It’s been all of nine months since Meridian Behavioral Health Systems took over operation of Southeast Louisiana Hospital (SELH) in Mandeville in what we like to call the Jindal Swindle and already the facility has been notified that it has been found to have deficiencies serious enough to threaten its eligibility to continue participation in Medicare.
Meridian, a Florida-based company chosen to run SELH after Gov. Bobby Jindal chose to close the hospital, has been running the 58-bed facility under the name of Northlake Behavioral Health System.
Jindal announced last year that he was closing the hospital, effective Oct. 1, a move that left mental patients in all of southeast Louisiana, including the New Orleans, Houma and Thibodaux metropolitan areas, with no access to any state mental treatment facility. The move threw more than 300 SELH employees out of work.
Formed as a company less than a year before taking over the Mandeville hospital, Meridian had never handled a facility the size of SELH and in fact, listed no facilities it had ever run on its application.
And it didn’t take long for that inexperience to surface.
Northlake Behavioral Health System CEO Richard Kramer was notified by the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) on June 3 that Northlake no longer qualified for participation in Medicare.
“After a careful review of the May 23, 2013, survey report, we have determined that Northlake Behavioral Health System no longer meets the requirements for participation in the Medicare program,” wrote Greg Soccio, manager of the CMS Non-Long Term Care Certification and Enforcement Branch.
“Although the deficiencies do not constitute an immediate threat to the health and safety of patients, the deficiencies have been determined to be of such a serious nature as to substantially limit your hospital’s capacity to render adequate care and prevent it from being in compliance with all the conditions of participation for hospitals,” Soccio’s letter said. “Consequently, we plan to terminate participation in the Medicare program if compliance is not achieved within the given timeframes specified.”
Soccio, in his letter, gave Sept. 1, exactly 11 months after Meridian took over the facility, as the date of its termination in Medicare. “CMS will monitor your progress in correcting the deficiencies cited,” he said. “You must submit by June 14 a plan of correction with acceptable time schedule.” His letter, while imposing a July 3 deadline for completion of corrective action, listed criteria Northlake must meet for recertification:
• The plan must address correcting the specific deficiency cited;
• The plan must address improving the processes that led to the deficiency cited;
• The plan must include procedures for implementing the acceptable plans of correction for each deficiency cited;
• A completion date for the implementation of the plans of correction for each deficiency cited;
• All plans of correction must take a QAPI (Quality Assurance/Performance Improvement) approach and address improvements in its systems in order to prevent the likelihood of the deficient practice reoccurring;
• The plan must include the monitoring and tracking procedures to ensure that the plan of correction is effective and that specific deficiency cited remains corrected and/or in compliance with the regulatory requirements;
• The plan must include the title of the person responsible for implementing the acceptable plan for correction.
Subsequent to Soccio’s letter, Kramer submitted a 43-page plan of correction to CMS on June 14, the deadline given by CMS.
As serious as the letter may have been to Northlake and as welcome as it may have been to those opposed to the privatization, it did leave one gigantic loophole for Jindal:
“The Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals (DHH) will conduct a focus Medicare survey of your facility to assess your hospital’s compliance with the conditions of participation that were found out of compliance and assess your corrective actions,” Soccio’s letter said.
“Compliance must be achieved at the time of this revisit if further action is to be avoided. If you remain out of compliance at the time of your revisit, you can expect to receive another letter advising you of the continuation of the termination process and your appeal rights.
“You will again be asked to submit an acceptable plan of correction to our office and we may conduct one final revisit before the termination date,” it said.
That July 3 deadline was more than a week ago and a CMS spokesperson in Dallas said on Wednesday that no new paperwork had been received on Northlake by his office.
But allowing DHH to make the determination of compliance? This is the same agency that, under former Secretary Bruce Greenstein, was allowed to manipulate specifications to allow Greenstein’s former employer, CNSI, to bid on and win a $280 million contract that is now the subject of a federal investigation.
Greenstein may be gone but his successor, like Greenstein, was appointed by Jindal and does anyone really doubt that the governor maintains an iron grip over DHH? And Jindal doesn’t like to admit he ever made a mistake.
Anyone care to take any bets on the outcome of that DHH focus Medicare survey of Northlake?
Louisiana Voice 
It may be wrong, but I’ve heard that Meridien is owned by another former DHH Secretary, Alan Levine’s, brother.
The major players seem to be Wesley Mason (google and read about his time at The Pines, a facility in Virginia) and Dawn Steinberg. I’m curious about them, because it certainly seems clear that this company was created to receive this contract. Who knows who the actual investors are, though.
I have heard similar allegations…the Jindal/Levine/Greenstein partnership stands to gain
The Feds are setting them up and when they do strike, all they will do is hold their hand out for the cuffs to be placed on them.
One can certainly hope so.
What do you want to bet on a drastic increase in “patients” in the state’s biggest and most expensive homeless shelters/mental hospitals i.e. the parish prisons.
The school plans have failed. The mental health system has failed. The trust fund for the elderly is going to nursing homes instead of community based systems. Our legislators would be doing the state a huge favor by getting Jindal out of office and into the private sector, or better, the federal pen, well before his term ends.
This will be the first of many “private partner” failures to meet federal standards. All of Governor “NERO” Jindal’s brilliant “outsourcing” ideas are going to go up in smoke and he isn’t finished yet. He won’t be satisfied until the entire structure of state government collapses. Bobby and his merry band will be “fiddling” their way out of town while the people of Louisiana wonder what the hell happened. Maybe one of our neighboring states will annex us.
We all know what the hell happened! ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) members have sold us out to the highest bidders! The question is what are “we the people” going to do about it? If there is strength in numbers, then we are failing miserably as Americans, for “we the people”still outnumber ALEC members! “We the people need to rise up, and take our states and country back!
WHO AM I????
Healthcare for sale or rent: education underspent,
No funds to help the poor:(((
Corporate welfare at my door:))
Tea Party paves my way, Stupid Party has no say,
I’m a man of means by no means, King of the Rhodes!
I know every ALEC member by name,
all of their plans to profit and gain, and every member that ALEC controls,
Money bags Murdock and Elitist Karl Rove.
Tea Party paves my way,
Stupid party has no say,
I’m a man of means by no means ,
King of the Rhodes.
I sing, Old cronies I have found
Destination, prison bound,
Old worn out public schools,
That don’t pay no union dues.
Tea Party paves my way,
Stupid party has no say,
I’m a man of means by no means
King of the Rhodes.
Roger Miller would be proud.
How true! What will happen, time will tell!
Bravo!
One has to wonder why no one with any responsibility in our state government is doing anything relative to investigating all of the alleged fraud it appears is going on in the Jindal administration; prosecuting him and his appointees; and calling for impeachment of Governor Jindal. It seems our legislature is oblivious to all of it.
Louisiana Voice is the key that unlocks the corruption in state government, and “we the people” are super proud of your blog, Mr. Aswell!
Again, as I ask every time I see another great piece of journalism in Louisiana Voice, why do the Times Picayune and The Morning Advocate continue to let this stuff go on without reporting on it? Jindal’s swindles are more than worthy of some large screaming headlines and a five-part investigation piece! They should be ashamed.
“why do the Times Picayune and The Morning Advocate continue to let this stuff go on without reporting on it? ”
That’s because we no longer have a free press. Most news outlets are owned by a handful of companies. These companies dictate what is reported and what is not. It’s the effect of all of these mergers. When big companies buy out smaller companies and even other larger companies, the people lose.
The hypocrisy of Jindal’s swindlelocracy becomes more gutgrinding by the minute! It utterly repulses me and multitudes of others to see John Boy White’s feigned contempt of Louisiana educators materialize into a supposed remedy with his famous VAM test of the effectiveness of school teachers while paralleling that mockery of accountability with a voucher system which requires no accountability whatever! In other words, if you do away with accountability, there will be no failing schools or students to receive those failing letters. If you sweep the dust under the rug, then we have an immaculate education.
A clue into the depths of White’s disingenuous spiel was his changing of his own title from Secretary of Public Education to Secretary of Education, which in all honesty implies not the retreat of government from education but the insinuation of government into even private education. After all, how can education be private if it is receiving welfare from government? I call it welfare because Louisiana taxpayers are giving tens of millions to bogus education facsimiles and getting absolutely nothing in return, no accountability whatsoever!
I waited for our famous legislators including Senate Education Committee Chairman Appel to grasp the conundrum at hand by grasping White by the collar and asking him, “do you want to promote or destroy public education? We are bound by law to support public education!”
That not forthcoming, I can only suppose that Mr. White hiding under his title is simply groveling at the feet of his prophet Mr. Milton Friedman who believed that all things extant could be made right by the infusion of more free market solutions.
Would we ever have bounded from the American Revolution with no roads to a modern highway system with a free market system which winced at the unprofitable prospect of building something the profitability of which would only be realized decades later, if at all?
W Bush tried to privatize the war in Iraq to hide the American casualties of war and to prevent the accountability for a trillion dollars of American mayhem and waste. (Iraq introduced us to the concept of trillions, but the Republicans pretend that that concept comes only after the election of Barack Obama.) Do we want the Iraqization of education, too? Should we dispatch billions of education dollars to Walmart and other great corporations who manufacture and sell mumbles of education related materials to unwary students and make the state pay for it? If those corporations own our legislators, what do you think will happen?
Corporations can only afford quick fix solutions. They must have instant profits. Such is the limit of corporate hegemony. The American people are a much larger institution. We can afford many outlays which will only profit us much further down the road when in the bind of some terse situation (World Wars I and II) we instantly need the products which private enterprise sneered at, and with those products readily at hand through the enterprise of government, instantly dispatch them in the national interest.
Education is one of those products.
Ronald Reagan at least suggested the solution to America’s seemingly intractable problem when he introduced the idea of “enterprise zones” which at least recognized the problem at hand and hinted that only by making the lives of students better could we expect their grades to also get better. The problem of education is not too much government, but not enough government to reach into the homes where desperate situations require a focus on immediate problems instead of a focus on the learning which will provide a lifetime of rewards. The pinching of ultimate fulfillment in favor of survival which we have named poverty operates a lot like the free enterprise system, grasping at what is now and being completely oblivious to the future, promotes a shortsightedness which closely relates to ignorance.
Ignorance is an enemy of the poor which even erodes the capacity of the middle class while promoting only the charlatans and hucksters who victimize all if they have the infrastructure in place to advance their purposes.
Changing that institution and it’s prophets, is the problem at hand.
[…] join Override the Veto advocates to announce that our efforts are not over. Indeed, with the revelations that the private firm that took over operations of the Southeast Louisiana Hospital will…, it will be only a matter of time before Jindal’s privatization scheme will be brought forth […]
“But allowing DHH to make the determination of compliance?”
The Social Security Act places the responsibility for health standards surveys on the State. Unless a hospital is going for “deemed” status by having a private organization like JCAHO conduct its survey, then the “Single State Agency” (DHH) takes on the responsibility for surveys.
[…] Another Jindal Swindle in trouble: SELH, aka Northlake, loses Medicare eligibility nine months after… […]
The state has been duped seriously by Meridian–two law suits are pending against Meridian whose principal place of business was Houston, Texas with a facility in Ruston, LA. Someone has to pierce the corporate veil to get to the bottom of this rip off of taxpayer money and look a Magellan as well.