Cover the ~95,000 Tennesseans stuck earning too much for TennCare and too little for private insurance, using the federal money Tennessee taxpayers already paid in.
Tennessee is one of ten states that still hasn't closed the Medicaid coverage gap. Every year we don't act, federal dollars that Tennessee taxpayers already paid flow to other states instead.
We'll extend TennCare to every adult earning up to 138% of the federal poverty line. The federal government covers 90% of the cost. For every dollar Tennessee spends, nine federal dollars come home, roughly $420 to $510 million a year flowing to Tennessee hospitals, clinics, and providers.
The expansion includes dental, vision, mental health, and addiction treatment coverage. Because untreated dental disease and vision problems are significant barriers to employment, Tennesseans won't just be more healthy, they'll be more capable of taking care of themselves and each other.
Get up to 12 weeks of partial pay to care for a new baby, a sick family member, or your own serious illness, paid for by a small shared payroll premium.
When a new parent, a cancer patient, or someone caring for a dying parent needs time off, they shouldn't have to choose between their family and their paycheck. Tennessee is one of the only states in the Southeast without any form of paid family leave.
Colorado built a program to solve this in three years, passed by ballot initiative in a purple state. Their program provides up to 12 weeks of partial wage replacement, funded by a shared employer and employee premium of 0.9% of wages. Over 175,000 claims have been filed since benefits started flowing. We'll build on Colorado's model. At 0.9% of Tennessee's wage base, the program generates roughly $2 billion a year in insurance premium revenue, fully self-funding paid parental leave. Tennessee's Department of Labor already runs a modern claims platform that can be adapted to serve this purpose.
Build the food hubs, cold storage, and procurement preferences that keep Tennessee-grown food in Tennessee, and expand Pick Tennessee branding so shoppers see Tennessee first at the store.
Chapter 12 farm bankruptcies rose 46% nationally in 2025, with the Southeast seeing a 69% increase. Tennessee has rich agricultural land, but we've become too dependent on supply chains that stretch thousands of miles and when those chains break, our communities suffer.
We'll invest in regional food hubs and cold storage to keep Tennessee-grown food in Tennessee. State institutions, including schools, hospitals, and state facilities, will buy Tennessee-grown food first. Pick Tennessee Products already has nearly 3,200 members and growing. We'll scale it into a statewide brand with dedicated marketing and retail partnerships, the way Kentucky Proud achieved 70% to 80% recognition statewide.
We'll also issue tariff buffer grants to help farmers with cover crop diversification and specialty crops that federal aid misses. A state that can feed itself is a state that can survive anything.
Free breakfast and lunch for every kid in Tennessee's highest-need districts, sourced from Tennessee farmers and cooked in upgraded school kitchens.
In March 2025, the federal government cancelled programs that put roughly $20 million into Tennessee schools and Tennessee farms. Meanwhile, nearly one in five Tennessee children live in a food-insecure household.
We'll replace the cancelled federal local food purchasing with a state reimbursement program directed to provide free breakfast and lunch in approximately 40 school districts starting Year 1, covering the state's most distressed counties - roughly 200,000 kids. In addition we'll create kitchen capital grants for schools to give those rural districts the refrigeration and prep equipment to cook from fresh ingredients instead of reheating processed food.
And we'll scale this architecture over time. In year 3 to 4 we'll expand to medium-need districts with the goal of reaching universal statewide breakfast and lunch.
Protect Tennesseans' right to make their own medical decisions, with expanded access to contraception, comprehensive sex education, and real support for pregnant women and families.
The states with the lowest abortion rates aren't the ones with the strictest bans. They're the ones with the best sex education, the most accessible birth control, and the strongest support for mothers and families. This is the pro-life case for prevention. If your values tell you every life matters, invest in the things that actually reduce abortions instead of the things that just push them underground.
Most Tennesseans share the same goal regardless of politics or faith: fewer abortions, healthier families. Roughly six in ten women who seek an abortion are already mothers. They're not the caricature that gets painted in debates. They're women raising children and making some of the hardest medical decisions of their lives.
In July 2025, Tennessee became the first Southern state to protect access to IVF and birth control under state law. We'll enforce and expand that protection. Every Tennessean has the right to make their own medical decisions without the government standing in the exam room.
Help working Tennesseans keep more of every raise by gradually phasing out Medicaid, SNAP, and childcare subsidies instead of cutting off all at once.
Tennessee has a hidden tax on work. When a family's income rises even slightly, government benefits don't phase out gradually. Medicaid, SNAP, and Childcare subsidies vanish all at once. In Tennessee surveys, 85% of lower-income families report experiencing the benefits cliff, and one in four turned down raises to protect their coverage.
The Future Families Fund will pay for childcare and healthcare up to 300% of the federal poverty level. But those investments are wasted if a modest raise costs families everything the Fund just provided. We'll replace cliffs with gradual phase-outs, sliding-scale copayments, and transition periods where benefits taper as income rises. Modern eligibility systems will calculate sliding-scale benefits in real time instead of applying binary cutoffs.
Tennessee seniors age in their own homes, with better-paid home health aides, Meals on Wheels, senior transportation, and elder abuse prevention.
Tennessee has rebalanced its long-term care spending to roughly the national average. But 15,000 Tennesseans still live in nursing facilities, and by 2040 the oldest cohort will grow 72%. Nursing home care costs approximately $108,000 a year through TennCare. Home and community-based services cost roughly $20,000 to $25,000 for the same person.
We'll expand the CHOICES program to meet actual demand instead of capping enrollment. We'll also raise home health aide wages from Tennessee's $14.65 average and build career pathways from aide to licensed nurse. Lastly, we'll increase funding for Meals on Wheels, senior transportation, and elder abuse prevention. The upfront investment is $75 million in Year 1. By Year 5, shifting 400 people a year from facilities to home care generates $181 million in gross Medicaid savings.
Cover childcare costs for working Tennessee families earning up to $99,000, with parents free to choose center-based, home-based, or faith-based providers.
Tennessee already subsidizes childcare for families up to roughly $87,000 through Smart Steps. But families earning more get nothing despite being unable to afford quality care on their own.
The Future Families Fund closes that gap with a sliding-scale subsidy. Parents choose the provider: center-based, home-based, faith-based, whatever works for the family. Reimbursement rates tied to actual cost-of-care data ensure providers are paid fairly. If federal childcare funding is cut, the Fund backstops the full population so no Tennessee family loses coverage because of decisions made in Washington.
Together with CoverKids, this creates one threshold: if your family earns under $99,000, your kids are covered. Healthcare and childcare, no gaps.
Smaller class sizes, more counselors and special education aides, and retention bonuses for teachers at the schools that need them most.
In 2025, Tennessee surveyed 42,000 educators about their needs. The top answer wasn't pay. It was working conditions: planning time, discipline support, and class sizes.
We'll repeal the Education Freedom Scholarship program and redirect $144 million a year into public schools. Combined with $200 million from the Future Families Fund, we'll pay for behavioral health specialists to bring counselor ratios to national standards, enforce class size caps by hiring more teachers, paraprofessionals for every self-contained special education classroom, and pay retention stipends at the schools that need them most. The package starts at the 108 lowest-performing schools and expands only after independent evaluation proves it works.
Make sure every Tennessee mother survives childbirth, with doulas, group prenatal care, addiction treatment, and telehealth in rural counties.
Pregnancy-related deaths in Tennessee more than doubled between 2019 and 2021. The state's own Maternal Mortality Review Committee says 76% were preventable, and the system is even harsher for Black women who die at roughly 2.5 times the rate of white women. Roughly a third of deaths happen weeks to months after delivery, when the healthcare system has reduced support for mothers.
We need to solve this end-to-end. We'll cover doulas through Medicaid, where a systematic review of 27 trials found continuous support reduces cesarean deliveries by roughly 25%. We'll expand group prenatal care, and co-locate addiction treatment with prenatal care so no mother has to choose between getting help and keeping her child.
A sovereign wealth fund for Tennessee that invests in our future by funding childhood development, forever.
Every child in Tennessee deserves the best possible chance to learn, grow, and develop into a caring and capable Tennessean. Many challenges stand in the way, like our lack of school funding for which we now rank last in the nation. But we cannot realistically alter course without new revenue.
To solve this, we will create the Future Families Fund, a permanent sovereign wealth fund modeled on Alaska's Permanent Fund. Four dedicated revenue sources will initially feed it: cannabis legalization and taxation, and a tobacco excise increase, a succession contribution on estates (with after $5M for family homes $5M and $25M for and family farms and businesses), and a capital gains contribution on realized gains above $250k excluding primary homes. Combined annual revenue is projected to reach $1B at maturity. Every year, the Fund pays for current programs and invests surplus in a long-term portfolio. Once returns cover costs, the Fund sustains itself.
Programs will only launch when funding is confirmed. And for Tennesseans who want to do more, the Tennessee Volunteer Roll lets individuals and families contribute tax-free before or after paying any obligation.
Every Tennessee kid deserves full medical, dental, vision, and mental health coverage, no matter what their family earns.
CoverKids already insures Tennessee children up to 250% of the federal poverty level. We'll expand it to 300%, the threshold where the federal Children's Health Insurance Program match covers roughly 90% of the cost. For every dollar Tennessee spends, nine federal dollars flow back to Tennessee providers.
Children's healthcare costs a fraction of adult coverage. For businesses currently covering dependents, this takes a real expense off their books. For families earning just above today's eligibility cutoff, it means their kids see a doctor, a dentist, and a counselor without anyone choosing between care and rent. The cost to the Future Families Fund is roughly $3 million a year after the federal match.
Refresh Tennessee's 10-year-old wellness curriculum and require a half-credit of financial literacy to graduate, so students learn how to budget and read a lease before they sign one.
Tennessee's Lifetime Wellness standards haven't been updated since 2016. Meanwhile, the state has no financial literacy graduation requirement. Students can graduate without ever learning how a credit score works, how to read a lease, or what compound interest does to a car loan.
We'll refresh the K-12 wellness curriculum with updated nutrition science, mental health literacy, and digital wellness content. We'll add a half-credit financial literacy requirement modeled on Utah, Indiana, and Iowa, all red-state precedents with durable bipartisan support.
This investment will pay dividends as kids who knows how to handle stress, feed themselves well, and manage money grow up to be better prepared for real life.
