Louisiana Voice

The Department of Health and Hospitals apparently is moving forward with its plan to contract out its information technology (IT) services to the University of New Orleans, the State Civil Service’s objections notwithstanding.

That’s the word received by LouisianaVoice from one of the IT employees who is one of the 69 employees scheduled to lose their jobs in the move touted to the Civil Service Board on Feb. 1 by Carol Steckel, chief of DHH’s Center for Health Care Innovation and Technology.

More about her background later.

An email received on Monday from the IT employee announced, “I have already been Teagued,” a reference to Gov. Bobby Jindal’s firing of Social Services grant reviewer Melody Teague in October of 2009 a day after her legal testimony against Jindal’s proposed streamlining of state government and that of her husband, Tommy Teague, 18 months later.

Tommy Teague was the director of the Office of Group Benefits who took the agency from a multi-million dollar deficit to a $500 million surplus. But his hesitancy in jumping on board Jindal’s privatization “sold train” cost him his job last April.

“My last day is March 2,” the employee, whose identity is being protected by LouisianaVoice, said in his email. “We have been scrutinized so much since this has happened back in December.”

He was referring to the conference call in December during which the IT employees were told their jobs would be gone in January. The Civil Service Board, however, shot down Steckel’s proposal, saying she had done a poor job of showing there would be a true savings by laying off employees.

The State Civil Service Board must approve any proposed contract before it can be implemented. To get that approval, agencies must show that the contract work is a task that cannot be performed by state civil service personnel and that any layoffs are not the result of political decisions.

That regulation stems from a 2003 State Supreme Court decision that said the City of New Orleans could not contract out services which could be performed by existing employees and that the city could not lay employees off for political reasons.

Following that conference call, the IT employees returned to their work stations only to learn that they had already been locked out of their state computers, leaving them with nothing to do until the date of their terminations. They regained access to their computers a few weeks later, however.

“There is no security anywhere in DHH,” the employee said.

That is fairly evident across the board in agency after agency by now. The Civil Service Board, which voted unanimously on Feb. 1 to reject the contract proposal, is scheduled to meet March 7 at which time the IT contract is expected to be presented again.

Another IT employee also emailed LouisianaVoice earlier to say, “I am one of the 69 DHH Information Technology staff that is affected by the UNO contract.

“Basically, we have been misinformed on future employment by DHH executives on three occasions. At each meeting, we felt as though we were being threatened with furlough without pay, having to pay 100 percent of COBRA to maintain our insurance, (and) being threatened (with) not receiving our 300 hours of saved annual leave.”

Steckel first said the proposed contract would save an estimated $2.1 million over the next three years but later revised that upward to $7 million. But member after member challenged her numbers with one saying he had “zero confidence” in the figures she provided.

While her proposal to contract the IT services would chop the legs out from under the 69 employees, that apparently is nothing new for her. In fact, it appears to be her style.

Before coming to DHH in November of 2010, she served as Alabama’s Medicaid Commissioner from 1988-1992 and again from December of 2003 until her departure for Louisiana.

It was in that capacity in Alabama that in 2008 she implied that poor residents of Alabama apparently did not need artificial limbs.

In January of that year, she submitted the state’s Medicaid budget that cut programs that pay for prosthetics and orthotics (an orthopedic apparatus used to provide support and alignment to prevent or correct deformities) because, she said, the programs were optional, not mandatory.

Saying she wanted to present a budget that was realistic in the face of state budgetary problems, she said, “Every day in the state of Alabama, people make tough decisions about what they can and cannot afford. State government must do the same.”

Rep. Barbara Boyd of Anniston sounded a chord that has come to have a familiar ring in Louisiana when she said Alabama is at a disadvantage because it does not appropriate the kind of money that would attract more than the bare bones federal matching funds.

“With the high rate of diabetes in this state (Alabama), cutting a program that pays for prosthesis could be devastating to amputees,” she said.

One Alabama observer described the move as a trifecta: “penny wise, pound foolish and heartless to boot.”

Well, folks, that’s the nature of compassionate conservatism. Or passionate, anyway.

And Louisiana, it would appear, has franchise rights.

In case you’ve ever wondered why Jindal keeps going out of state for these people who parrot his philosophy with such consistency, there’s a reason: they don’t have to live with us. They’ll be gone as soon as he leaves office.

But we’ll be stuck with the cleanup.