By: Steve Spires
When Gov. Bobby Jindal’s administration presented its mid-year budget cuts to the Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget last month, Commissioner of Administration Paul Rainwater assured lawmakers that neither Medicaid providers nor LSU hospitals were being affected.
Not so fast. Now it appears the LSU public hospitals , which provide critical safety-net care for the state’s poorest residents, will in fact have to cut $29 million over the next six months, according to a story in the Baton Rouge Advocate.
How did this happen?
In a nutshell: To help close the $251 million December shortfall, the administration replaced $50 million in state dollars it was planning to spend at the Department of Health & Hospitals with federal dollars through a change in what is called “means of financing.” Legislators were assured that this was simply the result of a smarter use of federal dollars and would protect state health-care services from cuts.
But when something sounds too good to be true, it often is. And in this case, it turns out the LSU public hospitals were counting on using the same federal dollars to pay for their own operations – something legislators weren’t told at the time.
Now the LSU hospitals – including small, rural hospitals that provide critical outpatient care to communities with few health-care options – are starting 2012 by deciding which employees to fire and which services to cut.
More than anything, this latest episode shows the need for new revenues to fund vital safety-net services. Instead of robbing Peter to pay Paul year after year, the state needs a long-term strategy for paying its health-care bills while ensuring that its neediest residents get the care they need. For years, we have been told that state agencies are doing “more with less.”
But the state’s public hospitals will be doing less with less after this latest round of cuts.
Unfortunately, there is little that can be done in the short term. The Legislature is constitutionally barred from considering any revenue measures when it meets this spring, when the Legislature is expected to face another billion-dollar shortfall.
And that means more of a cuts-only approach that harms education and health care.
the states needs to take louisiana residents only. i understand people work here live out of state. treat them and send them to their doctor. there exceptions to every rule, but ER is foe emergency not colds, etc. the state of LA can not continue this way, if you are going to cur then cut from govenors offices on down . no one should be exempt. This state has a lot of waste and still some corruption. weW have not had a raise in 3 years, it is time other agencies pays the price with cuts not just hospitals and education.
It’s ironic how leppoe who are perfectly willing to spend thousands of dollars to send their own children to private schools (or volunteer hundreds of hours at bake sales, car washes, etc.) are so quick to say that throwing money at the problem is not necessary to fix the problems in public schools. I agree that merely giving more money to schools is not an end but it’s certainly a necessary beginning. Spending that money wisely and well is of course the more important step, and it would be so easy to find a lot of schools or districts that had budget increases and squandered that money on ideas, programs, agencies, district-level offices or departments, or other items that proved ineffective in improving learning in their schools (notice I didn’t say improving test scores the two may occasionally coincide, but correlation does not necessarily equal causation.. or vice versa). I challenge anyone, however, to find examples of schools where budgets were CUT and they proceeded to show remarkable improvement (and changing the demographics of your student body to affect test scores doesn’t count!). Money is not a solution, but it is an necessary component to any important changes.