Massey likes Insure Tennessee despite Republican pedigree

Friday, March 4, 2016, Vol. 40, No. 10

State Sen. Becky Duncan Massey points proudly to a picture of her father on Air Force One with President Ronald Reagan when he visited Athens, Tennessee, in 1985.

John Duncan served as Knoxville’s mayor and then as an East Tennessee Republican congressman for 24 years, succeeded by her brother, U.S. Rep. Jimmy Duncan Jr., in 1988.

Yet Massey, 61, doesn’t consider her 2011 election to the 6th District Senate seat a “natural” progression.

“I don’t really feel like I ran because of my family. I feel like I’m doing a better job because of the example my dad had set and watching him over all those years,” Massey says during an interview in her Legislative Plaza office.

Of course, she did know the ins and outs of politics.

She handled Federal Election Commission reports for years and the Duncan Family Barbecue, which now feeds about 6,000 people in Knoxville, gaining experience as a coordinator and facilitator.

“I realized I could get out of the receiving line if I started working on it. Now I can’t get rid of it,” she jokes.

Executive director of the Sertoma Center, a nonprofit agency providing services to intellectually disabled people, Massey began making trips to Capitol Hill through her work with the Sertoma Club and gained a comfort level on legislative matters in Nashville.

When Jamie Woodson resigned from the Senate in 2011, Massey captured a special election, then won a four-year term in 2012.

“People always say they knew I was going to run because of my family. I said if that was the only reason I was doing it I would have done it before I was 56 years old,” she says.

“But it was the right time. It was the right time with my agency to allow me to be here and structure things there and just a lot of my life experiences I bring to the table.”

Service oriented

As best she can tell, Massey is the only social services provider/businesswoman in the General Assembly. She understands what it’s like to serve “vulnerable people,” those who are most fragile, all while keeping an eye on a tight budget.

And though she comes from a line of conservatives, she voted twice in 2015 for Insure Tennessee as a member of the Senate Health and Welfare Committee, once in special session and once in regular session.

In that role, she explains, her responsibility was to consider how Insure Tennessee would affect the people’s health, providing coverage through a plan offered by Gov. Bill Haslam for some 290,000 people in a coverage gap between TennCare and the Affordable Care Act.

And while some can argue against it based on the expense or scrutiny of a federal waiver, Massey says, “I felt regardless of how people felt on other issues, there was no question it would make a positive difference on people’s health.”

She takes a similar stand on other legislative measures.

Stepping in for some of the state’s most fragile residents, Massey passed legislation in 2015 enabling people to obtain access to cannabis oil, medicine used mainly for children and babies with intractable seizures. Some children were having 200 to 300 seizures a day, and the drugs they used did little but put them in a stupor.

The plight of those children and their families “just touched my heart,” she says, and it took quite a bit of effort to get to the point the bill could pass in Tennessee, because of the stigma toward cannabis and marijuana. Ultimately, the bill that passed decriminalized the use of CBD oil in Tennessee.

“A number of the families are seeing significant decreases in the seizures, so it was really good,” Massey explains.

On a similar matter, the Department of Health is preparing to initiate screenings for Krabbe disease, the result of legislation Massey passed last year to help people cope with the metabolic disorder that destroys brain cells in children.

In addition, she pushed Tennessee’s participation in the federal Achieving A Better Life Experience (ABLE) Act, increasing the amount of money disabled people can have in their savings account from $2,000 to $100,000.

Another of her focal points this session is legislation setting up a task force to study the health-care delivery system, identifying barriers such as unnecessary regulation and poor access to primary care providers.

The bill mainly targets the scope of practice for advanced practice nurses and whether they can fill the gaps left by a shortage of physicians across the state.

Bleeding orange

A 1977 graduate of the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, Massey is an avid Lady Vols basketball fan and season-ticket holder, and a backer of all women’s athletic programs. She and her husband, Morton, a retired software developer, also coached girls softball for 20 years.

Massey says she recognized the value of the Lady Vols brand to all sports, and as a facilitator, when the university decided to do away with the brand, except for basketball, she put together a group of major donors and the national alumni president and went to meet with Chancellor Jimmy Cheek.

“I felt like there was a compromise there to begin with …,” she points out. “I just knew how passionate people were about it. I knew small-donor people that were gonna quit giving over it.”

Massey feels the university mishandled the matter from the outset, alienating 28,000 people who signed petitions to keep the Lady Vols name alive. She hoped the UT Board of Trustees would take action, but it didn’t.

“I felt like they did not follow their fiduciary responsibility. So it bubbled up to legislation, and at that point, finally, UT said ‘we’ll talk,’” she adds.

The result was an agreement for women athletes to wear a Lady Vols commemorative patch, though Cheek hasn’t stepped back from the university’s initial rebranding decision.

“We’ll be helping design this patch that will go on all the teams in recognition and honor of their heritage,” Massey says. “But there’s still hope that at some point when some of the administration there changes or the athletic director changes, there could be a chance it could come back fully.

“But keeping it alive keeps it alive. And while it wasn’t everything I would like to have seen, it was a compromise, and I believe in compromises.”

The Lady Vols logo isn’t the only case of UT-Knoxville hurting itself, she says.

The University’s Office of Equity and Diversity stepped on people’s toes when its Pride Center director last year encouraged students and professors to address transgender people with gender-neutral pronouns such as “ze” or “xe.”

In addition, a memo from the office warned employees to ensure holiday celebrations aren’t a Christmas party “in disguise.”

“They were kind of moving to the point of prescribing instead of educating, and I don’t think that’s a good thing. I don’t want to be told I can’t tell you Happy Hanukkah, or whatever. I want to be able to celebrate my Christmas,” she adds.

“When they [UT] came out with the pronouns, it was like you need to get to know your student and know their name. If they had put a period there and stopped, that would have been great. But, they had to go on and prescribe, no, you need to call them these weird names that nobody’s ever hardly heard of.

“So they were moving more to prescribing, which I think really is almost discriminatory.”

As a result, the Knox County legislative delegation called for a closer look at university diversity offices statewide. Massey questions whether the Office of Equity and Diversity isn’t “a little bloated,” especially since each college or school on campus has its own diversity officer.

Ultimately, she hopes UT President Joe DiPietro uses the issue and others to “drill down” and determine where things need to be “shored up.”

Questioning privatization

During a Republican Senate Caucus meeting last fall, Massey raised concerns with Gov. Haslam about his outsourcing proposal for departments across the state, including higher education, and whether they would have their “arms twisted.”

Massey says she’s met with people at UT and Pellissippi State Community College, everybody from janitors to presidents.

“And I’m still not convinced the cost savings are there,” she explains.

Both colleges are doing some outsourcing already, and UT brought one service back in house after outsourcing failed, she points out.

Making dollar-to-dollar comparisons aren’t exactly fair, either, she says, arguing job reductions could cause unemployment, and if a non-Tennessee company is selected to privatize facilities management, some of the revenue could follow them out of state.

“Dr. DiPietro will make the call for UT,” Massey says. But she notes, “There were several times folks were saying it’s Dr. DiPietro’s call but nobody wants to see tuition increases … so it’s like if they don’t do it, don’t come ask us for anything.”

Consequently, she wants to make sure the General Assembly watches the matter closely this session, even if it doesn’t have a vote.

On the go

Meanwhile, Massey maintains enthusiasm for her nonprofit agency, which provides vocational and life-skills training for 120 people, operating 29 residential locations in Knox County. She restructured her staff and works more on the “big picture” while serving in the Legislature.

The hobby for her and her husband, fittingly, is computerized checkout of charitable auctions in Knox and surrounding counties.

She and Morton, who wrote the program, attend about 40 charity events a year, and at the end of most Saturday nights she finds herself sitting at a computer.

If that’s not enough, Massey is leading an effort for the General Assembly in feeding East Tennessee, packaging 100,000 meals in Maryville March 5 to be distributed to families across the region.

“The event coordinator in me comes out. I’ll give you guys all the credit and I’ll do all the grunt work,” she says.

Maybe it’s one more lesson in public service she learned from her father.

Sam Stockard can be reached at [email protected].