Baton Rouge General Medical Center has had its share of tough times. At the end of the month, the hospital will close its Mid City emergency room, citing $2 million a month in losses due to the cost of caring for the uninsured after the state closed the city’s charity hospital, Earl K. Long Medical Center. But the General was dealing with the same problem back in 2001, when the charity system got 86% of the Medicaid Disproportionate Share funding in Louisiana, with nonstate hospitals seeing little to no reimbursement for the indigent care they provided. At the time, legislators were discussing cutting $100 million in state funds used to match federal dollars for Medicaid, leaving the program $325 million short of last year’s funding. Said William Holman, then-CEO of General Health System, at the time: “This is our Armageddon.”
—From the May 22, 2001, edition of Business Report
“Louisiana’s charity hospitals and their private counterparts both deal with numerous patients who cannot pay for their care. The charity hospitals get almost all of the government money set aside to cover that population and very little other money, while the noncharity hospitals get a tiny part of those funds and serve a growing number of the indigent.”
+ALSO FROM THAT ISSUE
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LOADED WITH LAWYERS: “Today, more than 18,000 attorneys are licensed to practice law in Louisiana, according to the state Bar Association, placing the state on the top 10 list of attorneys per capita. What’s more, of the 12 southern states, Louisiana ranks No. 1 in terms of attorneys and law students per capita. “Having too many lawyers and not enough business to go around is one of the reasons people have such low regard for the profession,” said Charles Colvin, a New Orleans attorney.
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CONDEMNING DARWIN: “In this session, the House Education Committee has been in the forefront of quirky legislation. One week the committee approved a resolution condemning Charles Darwin as the father of the kind of racism that led to Nazism. The resolution didn’t take 24 hours to capture the attention of the nation’s scientific community. The move made Louisiana look, well, backwards. … Even Gov. Mike Foster got into the fray, calling the resolution ‘weird’ and saying it would hurt economic development.”
