While the governor focused on his plans to revamp K-12 education and public retirement systems, health care only made political news recently when former Gov. Edwin Edwards had an overnight hospital stay to treat pneumonia. Yet the biggest change taking place in state government today has nothing to do with schools or pensions but rather concerns the dawn of a new era in public health care and the twilight of another. Though he is not giving speeches about it, Gov. Bobby Jindal has taken on his greatest challenge to make his brand of government work as he privatizes a large part of the Medicaid system, while the network of state hospitals, already facing an uncertain future, closes clinics, terminates programs and lays off hundreds of employees to meet steep midyear budget cuts. Bayou Health, the new program to manage the care of two-thirds of the Medicaid population, is Jindal’s big chance to prove that he can do more with less. He’s betting $2.2 billion—what the state now spends—that five private insurance companies can administer medical care for 800,000 people, mostly children and pregnant women, while improving currently poor health-care outcomes, saving the state money and, of course, turning a profit. Skeptics abound, including a good number of pediatricians, who see the first phase of the program, covering 180,000 patients in the New Orleans region and Florida parishes, getting off to a shaky start. Read the full column here.
(John Maginnis publishes LaPolitics Weekly, a newsletter on Louisiana politics, at LaPolitics.com.)
