“Access to healthcare not only results in better individual outcomes. It also helps to grow a productive workforce,” Governor John Bel Edwards told the Louisiana Health Summit, held Tuesday at Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge.
He told health care stakeholders in attendance that with the state budget crisis, accepting Medicaid expansion makes fiscal sense.
“This Medicaid expansion is more important today because of that shortfall and because of the challenges around our safety-net system, than it would have been otherwise.”
Meanwhile, at the Capitol, an Appropriations subcommittee was combing through the proposed budget for DHH, and finding out most of the public-private partnerships may soon be no more.
“It eliminates all the funding for all the public private partners, for everybody except Shreveport and New Orleans.,” DHH Undersecretary Jeff Reynolds explained the effects of the remaining $750-million shortfall for the new budget. He also said after the massive cuts to the current budget, there’s not much else left to cut.
“It’s either you start eliminating these public-private partners, or you start cutting waivers.”
Across town at the summit, the governor was saying pretty much the same thing.
“Right now, even as I’m talking to you, we have folks from DHH giving testimony to a subcommittee. And right now, with that level of cuts, we are going to struggle to keep our safety net hospitals alive,” Edwards said. “I am not satisfied with that plan. We’re going to do everything we can to shore up the safety-net hospitals and keep them operating. But we simply cannot.”
In committee, Covington Representative John Schroder had a question.
“So, what’s it look like if we get out of these private partnerships?”
“It’s going to be ugly, and it’s going to be lots of screaming and carrying on,” Reynolds said, frankly. “If we don’t have the money to pay these partners, then the state does not have the money to run these facilities, so I’m assuming that these facilities are shuttered and shut down.”
Then Schroder, who has been one of the strongest advocates to first make cuts before raising more revenue, asked, “Has privatizing saved the state money?”
The answer was, not really.
“Looking just at DHH and what we paid the historical Charity hospitals and what we pay the public-private partners, definitely it has not gone down,” Reynolds testified.
And at the summit, Governor Edwards addressed the issue of those who object to expanding Medicaid, even though it means getting more federal money while using a lesser proportion of state dollars to pay for health care services.”
“I still have some folks in the Legislature who don’t seem to understand the importance of this for our state. They don’t seem to understand how important it is for our budget, for our providers, for our people,” Edwards said. “Now, the good news is, they’re in a minority. But they have to stay in a minority in order for us to be successful.”