Letter: Save Louisiana public hospitals

One would think that Dr. Frank Opelka, a former U.S. Army surgeon, who is the recently appointed leader of LSU’s Health System, would be averse to the not-so accidental “friendly fire” that he is now engaged in toward his own hospital system.

Opelka is on record denigrating the performance of his Louisiana public hospital system, which is one of the most-efficient safety-net hospital systems in the country, with residency programs that win national recognition. In testimony before a legislative committee, he showed a slide of roughly 2 percent annual growth in health-care spending at LSU from 2003 to 2011, which is well below medical inflation and less than half of the growth in Department of Health and Hospitals’ Medicaid program.

He does this in a dramatic bar chart comparison and explains that LSU’s rising costs are requiring him to change the model. Any other health-care entity would be looking to change to an efficient model that can operate with only 2 percent expenditure growth. Can his private-sector models offer these services with the same low cost to the taxpayers? True costs of his private models haven’t even been addressed. He testified further that patients do not get good preventive care at LSU despite years of performance data that show otherwise.

Why would Opelka do this? Following coaching from the governor’s office, he has to demonstrate that the LSU public system is a bad performer in order to justify a plan to dismantle the system and privatize. This is Bobby Jindal’s standard modus operandi. You create a straw-man failure of the public entity then swoop in with “reforms” which cut public programs that provide critical services to our citizens. Forget the fact that there is not a sound alternative for care developed prior to the disassembling.

We are expected to have faith that those arrangements will be there. The problem is, the destruction has already begun, and patient care is already being affected.

Does this approach sound familiar? Teachers? Office of Group Benefits? Department of Corrections? Many at LSU have worked hard to provide a high-quality and cost-efficient experience for our patients in the face of repeated budget cuts and layoffs directed by our governor.

Now to have that record distorted by our own leader not only damages employee morale but erodes public confidence in the system. With Opelka calling the shots, we all need to be ready to duck.

Legislators have to stop this before it is too late. Louisiana needs its public hospital system. It is a travesty that Louisiana is one of the poorest states and will have no safety-net hospitals for its citizens and no public training hospitals for future doctors for the state.

Peggy Stemmans

medical technologist

Baton Rouge

Comments

1) Comment by JBradleyM.D. - 16/10/2012

Please sign this petition to help save our hospitals: http://www.change.org/petitions/louisiana-legislators-convene-a- special-legislative-session-to-address-the-healthcare-crisis

2) Comment by DMJ - 15/10/2012

I hate to say I told you so....but I did. This is what happens when you elect a guy who had a history of cutting funding for public health care and higher education- the more power you give him, the more he'll cut.

3) Comment by agagent - 15/10/2012

Obamacare shifts many citizens from private health insurance to public health insurance and to public hospitals. The weak economy does the same. When the CBO revised its estimate of the cost of Obamacare to $1.76 trillion (2012-2021), it also revise its estimate of the increased cost of Medicaid to the federal government by $168 billion. The federal stimulus mandates (welfare, Medicaid and education) and Obamacare put more stress on states’ budgets.

4) Comment by agagent - 15/10/2012

The trend is the same for public and private hospitals: Medicaid reimbursement rates do not cover the cost of providing Medicaid services and more and more providers will go bankrupt or stop taking Medicaid patients, according to Medicaid officials. Reform Medicaid or the system will collapse.

5) Comment by postscript56 - 15/10/2012

For the Jindal administration it is not about health care (or education, prisons, etc.). It's about first promoting Jindal's national aspirations, second identifying and blaming a liberal enemy, third creating a mechanism for transferring public dollars to private business, fourth relieving savior capitalists of their tax burdens. And when anyone asks "what's going on?" cite deliberative process and keep rolling. It is a very effective political strategy and Jindal has become very effective at it. But please spare me the moral superiorty of conservatism. Jindal is the poster boy for the hypocrisy of the radical right.