Landrieu negotiates Medicaid fix in health reform bill
Louisiana senior Senator Mary Landrieu has used her status as one of the last holdout votes on a comprehensive health care reform bill to negotiate a fix to the state's pending Medicaid crisis into the bill. The Times Picayune reports that Landrieu, who remains mum on her support for the bill, has gotten Senate Democrats to insert language into the bill that would have the federal government paying 68 percent of the state's Medicaid costs instead of. 63 percent come 2011. The fix amounts to about $300 million.
Louisiana is facing a huge deficit in its Medicaid budget once federal stimulus money runs out at the end of the year. In addition, a post-Katrina spike in the state's per capita income means the state must start paying an even greater share of its Medicaid costs. Some analysts estimate the state's shortfall will be as much as $900 million.
The man on the front lines of the efforts to plug the Medicaid budget hole, Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals Secretary Alan Levine, commended Landrieu. "Look," he tells the TP, "it's godd to have a senator in a position to be able to make demands like that. While I don't support the bill, she is doing the best she can to help the state, and she should be applauded."
There will soon be a whole lot of shakin’ going on at Benny’s Sportshack Supplement Depot, a new concept by Opelousas native Benny Nele. Located at 2002 Johnston St., the supplement shop, smoothie bar and café, featuring hot off the press paninis and wraps, plans to open in late May.
Philip deMahy Sr., a once respected New Iberia ad exec, was sentenced May 2 to spend the next two years (he faced up to 100 years) in a state penitentiary after state and federal investigators found dozens of images depicting children engaged in lewd sexual acts on his personal computer.
This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
An effort to restore a shuttered dancehall and document other vacant or razed honky-tonks could serve as a model for saving an endangered species of entertainment.
Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.
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