Louisiana Will Stop Providing End of Life Care to Low-Income Americans
20 January 13
his week, potential Republican presidential contender Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) rolled out one of the country's most regressive tax proposals, a plan that would shift Louisiana's tax burden away from the wealthy by raising taxes on the bottom 80 percent of state residents. Apparently, the "austerity" measures don't stop there.
According to New Orleans CBS affiliate WWLTV, Louisiana residents over the age of 21 who are on Medicaid - the public insurance program for disabled and poor Americans - will stop receiving hospice care benefits at the end of this month. That means that low-income Louisianans with terminal illnesses, debilitating disabilities, and chronic long-term medical problems will no longer have access to the essential home and medical care that they need.
And while the cuts are intended to help the state balance its budget, critics point out that it is more likely to increase health care costs by pushing previously-insured Americans with costly medical conditionsinto private hospitals and emergency rooms where they will not be able to afford their treatments:
The Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals say the elimination of hospice care for Medicaid patients will mean nearly $3.3 million in savings this year alone. In 2014, it'll mean $8.3 million in savings.However, Burns believes the state will end up paying much more with terminally ill patients forced to turn to local hospitals."They'll just go in and out of the hospitals, maybe go to ICUs, and they won't be able to have their family around them with hospice care," said Burns. [...]DHH says there were 5,819 recipients of hospice services through Louisiana Medicaid in the previous fiscal year.
By the Louisiana DHH's own estimates, the cuts to Medicaid hospice-care beneficiaries are only expected to reduce the state's projected $900 million budget deficit by 0.92 percent in 2014. These cuts will be imposed on top of the already draconian cutbacks to public education and health care programs that Jindal has in the pipeline.
Battles over Medicaid funding, particularly for those in need of long-term, specialized care, are nothing new. State budget cuts to the Medicaid program have long left disabled and special-needs Americans by the wayside, even in progressive states such as California. But one of the easiest ways for states to address their perennial public health funding issues is for them to participate in Obamacare's Medicaid expansion, which the federal government will fund for the first several years.
Jindal, however, has refused to participate in the expansion, calling it a "bad idea" that is "expensive for taxpayers." Ironically, Louisiana already takes in considerably more tax revenue from the federal government than it pays out, and Jindal's Medicaid cuts - coupled with his refusal to expand Medicaid - will likely exacerbate that dynamic by forcing Americans across the country to subsidize care for Louisianans who have fallen through the safety net.
Comments
What are you thinking? Not about the people, that's for sure.
N.
Republicans are going to let grannie suffer and die.
Republicans don't care about you...any of you -
they care about profit.
Any country-state that makes access to health care dependent on money, profit, class status - is a fascist state.
Jindal - just another Republican criminal - notice how the numbers just don't add up - typical Republican fraud and you...all of you suffer because of them.
What's the focus of life, of government? People or profit.
To Republicans profit is more important than you.
ASHAMED TO BE AN AMERICAN (especially since pol. clowns like this 'what the hell, let's kill' governor are now so easily election frauded into office, just like a non-elected, fully scripted puppet whore named 'W')
workers of the world, unite!
We need to stop gerrymandering that allows Republicans who couldn't get elected, to steal seats, hold power and collect salaries at tax payer expense.
I guess that also means "you" have to call Obama something other than Hitler...
As a person who physically and financially nursed a father with cancer and a mother with MS for 26 years, I know what is in store - for the ill and their families. This will only bring more financial, emotional and physical hardship on the sick and their care-givers. How anyone who isn't a gazillionaire can vote GOP these days is beyond me.
"the elimination of hospice care for Medicaid patients will mean nearly $3.3 million in savings this year alone"
How absurd and sick is this society - it is fascism - by definition.
If we don't get ours, they certainly shouldn't get theirs at our expense. Screw these guys.
And hallelujah! Oust the bums.
N.
The Republican guiding principles today are SELFISHNESS AND GREED, which they believe to be the essential "American Way Of Life." That is why our lifespan has dropped shamefully and our culture is in decline.
It is also no wonder why the old confederate south is the headquarters of the US conservative movement. What a disgusting place with leaders like Bobby Jindal. Let's hope he does run for president. He and Eric Cantor would make a nice team -- they'd sink the republican party forever.
There is no doubt in my mind that Jindal is playing the role of a "strike breaker" as a blackmail tactic to lead the way to break the back of government regulated healthcare. It's just the health-care version of the GOPs nationwide voter suppression flying wedge.
The poor already use ER as primary care in NOLA, the most expensive care there is.
Now health care chain providers will try
redistribute their costs, the most expensive in the health care system, to citizens in those states that behaved responsibly.
All federal funds should be denied to the state until it behaves rationally. This is actually directed to Afro-Americans who are poor. It is discrimination against the poor who are dying.