A recent study by the Louisiana Hospital Association and LSU economics professor Jim Richardson says continued state budget cuts to Medicaid would have a detrimental impact on the state’s health care system and trickle down into the state’s overall economy.
The report points out that the health care industry in Louisiana employs roughly 16 percent of the statewide workforce and accounts for approximately 15 percent of private payroll. The study, “Hospitals and the Louisiana Economy 2011,” says more than 99,000 of the state’s health care employees work in hospitals, which pay a collective $4.4 billion per year to their workers.
Also included in the study are breakdowns for metropolitan statistical areas across the state. In Lafayette’s metro area, 21,504 people work in the health care sector, with 6,152 of those employees working in hospitals. Hub City hospitals account for 4.7 percent of regional employment:
Hospitals account for [2 percent] of all healthcare establishments in Louisiana; however they comprised 37% of the total employees and 46% of the total payroll of the healthcare sector. Healthcare providers are a major economic influence within a community, and hospitals are often the most dominant contributors to a community’s economy.
Medicaid and Medicare account for 71 percent of the hospital services delivered in the state and are the primary funding sources for hospitals in Louisiana. For every 35 cents the state spends on the Medicaid program, Louisiana receives approximately 65 cents from the federal government. Because of this federal match, the impact of the state reducing its direct expenditures for Medicaid by $150 million would be a loss of an additional $430 million of federal dollars, reducing overall funding by $580 million.
From 2009 to 2010, Louisiana hospitals averaged about $903.7 million in building construction, leading to the creation of more than 15,717 new jobs yearly in sectors other than healthcare. The overall economic activity that is supported by hospital expenditures, including payroll, supplies and other services, leads to $690 million in state tax collections and $567 million in local tax collections.
Read the full report here.
MAY 21 Gambit columnist Clancy DuBos writes about the Mother's Day shooting, and how the stages of shock and blame and healing mirror those traveled by the same city following Hurricane Katrina. The city will recover, just as it did following the storm, by reaching out to help the people injured most seriously by the event, DuBos writes. It's how we heal, he says.
MAY 21 Here's a post on the Advocate (but buried on a subpage, not on the front) that reports something Louisiana Voice reported some time ago: a top DOE official lives in Los Angeles and "commutes" to Baton Rouge. The positioning of the story caused a stir on Facebook Monday, with several posters asking if the Advocate was covering someone's hiney. Sentell's stories on DOE are notoriously soft, and this one is no different: don't expect any hard questions in here.
MAY 21 Here's another post from blogger Tom Aswell about the "course choice" program. He's already reported on kids being signed up without their consent or knowledge, and has more here: For example, he tells of a six-year-old who was signed up for high school Latin. He also digs a little deeper into the sister companies of the main one operating in Louisiana; all of them seem to have complaints against them. Stinky.
MAY 21 Given the 80 percent cut in higher ed funding since he's been in office, it's clear Gov. Jindal would rather give tax cuts to out of state companies than have a functioning system, blogger Dayne Sherman argues in this post. The cuts have been such a disaster, Sherman says, that it will take 30 years to fix what's been broken. He says he believes the aim is to shut down most of the schools before Jindal leaves in 2016.
MAY 21 Blogger CB Forgotston says there are too many elections in Louisiana, and they're costing us too much money. The proof is in the pudding: turnout for most of these nonsensical pollings gets worse and worse, CB opines, even as millions of dollars that could be spent on health care or higher ed go down the tubes. The legislature must take action to stem the tide of pointless elections, he says.
MAY 21 Here's an interesting investigative piece by WVUE on the retirement benefits of some Jefferson Parish public employees. According to the story, the taxpayers are paying 100 percent of the retirement contributions of employees who started work prior to a certain date in April 1986 -- and have done for more than 30 years. It costs the parish millions annually, and might not be legal, the story reports.
MAY 21 This post on Bayou Buzz provides insight from Louisiana's intrepid pollster, Bernie Pinsonat, on the winners and losers from this year's legislative session. But to hear Bernie tell it, there's almost nuttin but losers: Jindal, the Republican party, the Fiscal Hawks all get big goose eggs in his win column.
MAY 20 This post on The Lens takes a look at a huge (either $500K or $250K) bill that one NOLA charter now has for school lunches. The RSD says the charter group didn't fill out the proper paperwork for federal reimbursement, but the story details how the RSD didn't ensure the people running the charter had the proper training, despite requests from hapless charter employees trying to fill out forms. Either way, somebody's asleep at the wheel.
Most Read
in case you missed it
Subscribe to this comment's feed