The phone line opened at 6 p.m. on Thursday for the first time in six months. At 5:58, Ida Gordon of Nashville picked up her cordless phone and started dialing. Ms. Gordon, 63, had qualified for TennCare until her grandson, who had been in her custody, graduated from high school last spring. Now she is uninsured, with crippling arthritis and a few recent trips to the emergency room haunting her.

“I don’t ask for that much,” Ms. Gordon said as she got her first busy signal, hanging up and fruitlessly trying again, and then again. “I just want some insurance.”

Gov. Bill Haslam, a Republican, has indicated that he will decide this week whether to support an expansion of Medicaid to cover more low-income adults, as called for in the federal health care law. Doing so would add more than 180,000 people to the TennCare rolls by 2019, according to the state, most of them adults like Ms. Gordon whose incomes are within 138 percent of the federal poverty level.

Ms. Gordon said she and her husband, who was injured on the job decades ago and is on Medicare, live mostly on his disability check of about $780 a month.

TennCare already provides health coverage to 1.2 million people, more than half of whom are children, at a combined state and federal cost of about $9 billion a year. Many in the Republican-controlled legislature, which includes a strong Tea Party element, opposes its expansion even though the federal government has promised to pay the full cost for the first three years and 90 percent after that.