Reports that the state is negotiating to lease the $1.2 billion University Medical Center it’s building in New Orleans to a nonprofit agency that operates two existing New Orleans hospitals—Children’s Hospital and Touro Infirmary—is troubling, not least because of the way the Jindal administration has shrouded the deal from public view.
So says health care analyst David Hood, who served in former Gov. Mike Foster’s administration as secretary of the state Department of Health and Hospitals.
“I think this has begun to be habitual with this administration,” Hood tells Daily Report. “There is no public process which informs people; and therefore, people are likely to be skeptical. Some of this plan may have substantial merit, but we don’t really know, do we?”
Officials with the LSU System and with the LSU Health Sciences Center have declined to comment on the proposed deal, which reportedly would involve a lease with the Louisiana Children’s Medical Center to operate the Interim LSU Public Hospital and the University Medical Center once it is completed.
UMC—which is supposed to be a replacement for the iconic Big Charity hospital that was shuttered after Hurricane Katrina—has been trumpeted by the Jindal administration and LSU officials as a first-class teaching institution for LSU residents and the heart of a future biomedical district in New Orleans.
Critics have argued that with more than 450 beds it is overbuilt and too expensive to operate, especially at a time when the state is closing charity facilities. Hood says what little information has come out so far only vindicates what critics have been saying for years.
“We were going to have a first-class medical center to train doctors, and they were going to attract the best talent from all over the country and so forth,” he says. “Where we stand now, I’m not quite sure; but it doesn’t look as promising as it did before.”
