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Lawsuit claims State got cart ahead of the horse in closure of Huey P. Long Hospital in Pineville, layoff of 100+ employees

Posted in Civil Service, DHH, Health Care, House, Senate, Lawsuits, Layoffs, Legislature, Legislators, Privatization on June 7, 2014| 9 Comments »

Did the Jindal administration get the cart ahead of the horse when it announced the layoff of more than 100 state employees at a state hospital in central Louisiana?

As if Gov. Bobby Jindal did not have enough on his plate with his attempts to gain approval form the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) for his hospital privatization plan, now the battle over the closure of one hospital has moved into the courts.

Brad Ott of New Orleans and Ed Parker of East Feliciana Parish have named the Louisiana State Senate, the State of Louisiana and the LSU Board of Supervisors in their lawsuit filed in 19th Judicial Court in Baton Rouge.

Their petition claims that the Senate Committee on Health and Welfare violated the state’s open meetings law in approving the closure of Huey P. Long Medical Center in Pineville.

Moreover, the petition says that while more than 100 classified employees are due to receive layoff notices effective June 30, the State Civil Service Commission is not scheduled to consider the LSU layoff plan until early July.

Wait. What?

Did the LSU Board of Stuporvisors really notify 100-plus employees that they no longer had jobs—before getting formal approval of the layoff plan from Civil Service?

Surely not.

The Rules of Order of the Senate, Rule 13.73, entitled “Notice of committee meetings during session,” provides in part: “Such notices shall be posted for each meeting as soon as practicable, but not later than 1 p.m. of the day preceding the meeting day.”

Rule 13.75, entitled “Meetings prohibited without notice,” provides in part: “No meeting of a committee, regularly scheduled or otherwise, shall be held unless there is full compliance with the requirements of Louisiana Senate Rule 13.73…”

The lawsuit says the notice for the April 2, 2014, meeting of the Senate Committee on Health and Welfare was revised on April 1 at 4:04 p.m. to add the consideration of SCR 48 by Sen. Gerald Long (R-Natchitoches).

SCR 48 was the Senate Concurrent Resolution that called for the closure of Huey P. Long. The resolution passed in the House Health and Welfare Committee by a 10-8 vote after nearly three hours of debate. By contrast, the Senate Health and Welfare Committee took only 10 minutes for unanimous passage.

Both petitioners say they had planned to testify in opposition to the resolution before the committee but that they were not notified that the committee would be taking up SCR 48 on April 2 because of the last minute revision to the notice of the meeting. “Consequently, both of the petitioners were effectively prevented from observing the deliberations…and expressing their concerns,” the petition said.

Wait. What?

Would a Louisiana Senate committee really do an end run around opponents to a controversial resolution in violation of the open meetings law in order to slip the resolution through?

Surely not.

But with the administration desperate to ram its hospital privatization through despite questionable funding methods, anything is possible. Jindal, in fact, has clearly demonstrated that he will go to any length to move his agenda along.

Plaintiffs’ attorneys J. Arthur Smith and Adrienne Rachel are seeking a declaratory judgment and injunctive relief subject to the state’s open meetings law, an injunction prohibiting the state from implementing provision of SCR 48, monetary damages for violations of the state’s open meetings law, and attorney’s fees.

Smith is a relative newcomer in litigation against the state but he has sent out notice that the old ways of doing business may be changing. He has already won one battle with the Department of Education over the department’s reluctance to comply with the state’s public records laws and currently has other suits pending against the Department of Agriculture and the Office of Alcohol and Tobacco Control.

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Alvarez & Marsal’s $5 million eyewash is released by Jindal administration only minutes before legislative adjournment

Posted in Contract, Contracts, DHH, DOA, Finances, Governor's Office, Legislature, Legislators, OGB, Office of Group Benefits, ORM, Office of Risk Management, State Police on June 3, 2014| 18 Comments »

The $500 million savings report by Alvarez & Marsal (A&M) was finally released on Monday only minutes before adjournment of the 2014 legislative session—and, conveniently for the administration, too late for critical feedback from lawmakers.

http://doa.louisiana.gov/doa/PressReleases/LA_GEMS_FINAL_REPORT.pdf

So, what makes this one any different than the others, given the fact that the A&M report acknowledges that Louisiana “has a long history of performance reviews, dating back to one performed by the Treen administration in the early 1980s?” Well, for one, the punctuation, spelling and grammatical errors contained in the report indicate that it was thrown together rather hastily to satisfy a state-imposed deadline for completion.

Of course the report was cranked out by “experts,” and as an old friend so accurately reminded us, an expert is someone with a briefcase from out of town.

The 425-page report, produced under a $5 million contract, while projecting a savings of $2.7 billion over five years (an average of $540 million a year), the substance of the report was sufficiently ambiguous to render the document as just so much:

(a)    Useless trendy jargon and snappy catch phrases like synergy, stakeholders, and core analytics to give the report the appearance of a pseudo-academic tome;

(b)   Eyewash;

(c)    Window dressing;

(d)   Regurgitation of previous studies by previous administrations that are now gathering dust on a shelf somewhere;

(e)    All of the above.

Three things were immediately evident with only a cursory review of the report:

  • Two offices that have been privatized by the administration as a means of savings and efficiency—the Office of Risk Management and the Office of Group Benefits—were subjected to rather close scrutiny by A&M which identified a host of ideas to make both offices more cost efficient. And we thought all along the administration had assured us of great cost savings and efficiency as its reasons for privatization in the first place. Yet A&M, in its report, claims its recommendations can save OGB another $1.05 billion while ORM can save an additional $128 million through implementation of recommendations contained in the report.
  • While A&M met extensively with and took suggestions from state employees who were tasked by the administration with coming up with savings ideas as far back as last September, not one word of acknowledgement is given to those employees in the report, prompting one employee to wonder, “Why the hell can these New Yorkers take my ideas and work and resell them to the state?” Of course the report did give a tip of the hat to Commissioner of Administration Kristy Nichols for her assistance in overseeing “all aspects of the state’s participation.” We suppose that will have to suffice.
  • Though virtually every office operating under the auspices of the Division of Administration came under the watchful eye of the A&M suits, not a single recommendation for increased efficiency and/or cost savings was offered up for the Governor’s Office itself. The closest A&M got to the governor’s office was the Office of General Counsel, the legal office of the Division of Administration. The obvious conclusion to be drawn from that is that the Governor’s Office is already operating at peak efficiency and minimum waste.

Most of the projected cost savings were based on assumptions for which A&M offered little or no supporting data other than arbitrary estimates and suppositions that could have been produced at a fraction of the report’s $11,760 per-page cost.

The report acknowledged that Louisiana already has the highest Medicaid recovery rate in the nation with $124 million in improper payments recovered but nevertheless listed as one of its recommendations that the Department of Health and Hospitals (DHH) “reduce improper payment in the Medicaid program.”

Seriously? Who would’ve thought that might be a way to save money?

Other suggestions included in the study by agency and projected savings (in parentheses):

DHH ($234.1 million)

  • Establish more cost-effective pediatric day health care programs and services;
  • Maximize intermediate care facility (ICF) bed occupancy rates;
  • Shift the administrative management of uninsured population from state management organization to local governing entities (Municipal and parish governments better take a long, hard look at that recommendation);
  • Improve the process and rate of transition of individuals with age-related and developmental disabilities from nursing facilities and hospitals. (So just where are those age-related and those with developmental disabled individuals being transitioned to? Are they to be removed from state facilities as a cost-saving move? And they accused Obama of creating death panels with the Affordable Care Act?)

Department of Transportation and Development (DOTD) ($99 million)

  • Expand advertising revenue for roads, bridges and rest stops;
  • Reduce the construction equipment fleet;
  • Convert some of vehicle fleet to natural gas (for this we needed a consultant?)
  • Reduce cost overruns with quality assurance/quality control engineering firm (another consulting contract);
  • Utilize one-inch thin asphalt overlay (and after reducing the construction equipment fleet we can change the names of our state routes from highways to obstacle courses).

Department of Corrections: ($105.3 million)

  • Expand certified treatment and rehabilitation program;
  • Expand re-entry program;
  • Increase use of self-reporting.

Department of Revenue and Taxation ($333.4 million)

  • Re-build audit staff positions depleted because of retirements and hiring freezes;
  • Increase compliance efficiency and reduce backlog of litigated cases

Department of Public Safety ($45.4 million)

  • Centralize state police patrol communications
  • Consolidate state police patrol command position;
  • Optimize state police patrol shifts
  • Expand Department of Public Safety span of control.

Office of Juvenile Justice ($44.2 million)

  • Increase probation and parole officers’ caseloads (Seriously? Do these clowns have even a remote idea of what these officers’ job is like? The caseloads have increased steadily and there have been no pay raises for what, five years now? For even suggesting that, those A&M suits should be horse whipped with a horse.);
  • Relocate youth from Jetson Center to other Office of Juvenile Justice (OJJ) facilities (so, just how out of touch was A&M to have not known the Jetson Center was closed in January?);
  • Increase OJJ span of control.

Department of Children and Family Services ($2 million)

  • Continue to implement innovative strategies intended to reduce;
  • Safely decrease the time children spend in state custody.

Louisiana Economic Development ($142.9 million);

  • Adjust fees for inflation;
  • Enhance review process for Motion Picture Tax Credits;
  • Enterprise Zone benefits and audit review process;
  • Consolidate Louisiana Economic Development (LED) offices into one government-owned facility (What? No privatization?).

Human Capital Management ($65.9 million)

  • Creation of agency workforce and succession plans;
  • Redesign of job families through creation of a competency model;
  • Improve the administration of Family and Medical Leave (FMLA) across agencies;
  • Review overtime policies;
  • Increase span of control for agency supervisors.

Office of General Counsel ($3.825 million)

A&M noted that the Office of the General Counsel (that would be the in-house legal counsel—they hate being called that—for the Division of Administration) “is responsible for ensuring that the commissioner’s statutory duty to respond to public record requests in a timely and legal manner is carried out.”

This was a favorite part of the entire report for us. The DOA Office of the General Counsel has historically delayed responding to public record requests of LouisianaVoice far beyond any reasonable—or legal—time limits. Louisiana’s public records statutes require an immediate access to public records unless they are unavailable in which case the custodian of the record must, according to law, respond in writing as to when they will be available within three working days. It is not at all unusual for the Office of the General Counsel to drag his feet for weeks on end before producing requested records.

But A&M has solved that knotty little problem by pointing out that as the custodian of the DOA’s public records, “it is the commissioner’s (Kristy Nichols) responsibility to receive and process public records.”

A&M’s recommendation that the Office of the General Counsel can generate its five-year cost savings simply by:

Increasing the organization efficiency of the office, ($1.975 million) and

Increasing the efficiency of document review process and reducing internal and external attorney costs ($1.85 million).

That, of course, raises the burning question of what will happen to Jimmy Faircloth?

Other suggested savings came under:

  • Procurement ($234.8 million);
  • Facilities Management and Real Estate ($70.9 million), and
  • Provider Management ($2.2 million).

“I am so proud of this report,” gushed Nichols. “These are real, common sense solutions that will not only save money for the people of Louisiana, but will improve the way we operate.”

Question, Kristy: If they are such “real, common sense solutions,” why has this administration in six-plus years experienced this epiphany before now?

Another question: If these suggestions, which you say were “thoroughly vetted,” are going to save money for us and make our lives better through better operations, where has Jindal, his cabinet secretaries, undersecretaries, deputy secretaries department heads, managers and great legal minds been all this time? Wasn’t it their job to give us the biggest bang for the buck? (Oops, that’s three questions.)

Oh, well, let’s go for broke here. Fourth question: Who “vetted” these wonderful ideas? If the vetting was done by those already on the state payroll, why didn’t those employees perform the task in the first place instead of blowing $5 million on this report that a second year economic major at LSU could have written?

Fifth question: Does the administration—and by extension, A&M—hold employee morale in such low regard that it was not considered as a factor in facilitating more efficient job performance across the board? Improved employee morale would seem to be conducive to cost savings, yet it was never addressed even once in the entire 425-page document. That omission speaks volumes.

And finally, if you are “so proud of this report,” why was it that you reportedly tossed an A&M representative out of your office with the admonishment that he’d better find something after he initially reported to you that his consulting firm was having trouble coming up the $500 million savings?

Could this explain why some of the “savings” appear to have been plucked out of thin air?

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Jindal, aka the Petulant Paranoid, teagues yet another state official for (gasp!) having opinion, possession of integrity

Posted in Contract, Contracts, DHH, Governor's Office, Health Care, Legislature, Legislators, Privatization, Teague on May 8, 2014| 14 Comments »

Bobby Jindal the Petulant Paranoid has teagued yet another high-ranking state official, LouisianaVoice has learned.

This time the victim is said to have been only a few months from retirement.

The governor who publicly advocates openness, accountability and transparency everywhere in the U.S. except Louisiana, has shown on repeated occasions that he cannot stomach any difference of opinion among state employees at any level, classified or unclassified—or even from legislators.

His paranoia rose (or sank, depending upon one’s preferred descriptive verb) to a new level on Thursday, however, when he fired Gary Crockett, former administrator at Huey P. Long Medical Center in Pineville just two days after the House Health and Welfare Committee voted 10-8 to close the facility.

Crockett last year tried to keep administration-ordered layoffs at the hospital to a minimum but was forced to make deep cuts in personnel.

The irony of Jindal’s ongoing purge, aka dissident cleansing is that Crockett had already left his $144,650-a-year position at Huey P. Long because of his differences with the administration. He took a position at another state medical facility where he thought—incorrectly, it turns out—he could ride out the rest of his career..

Word out of the State Capitol is that Jindal felt that Crockett may have been providing information to legislators opposed to the closure of the hospital as part of Jindal’s flawed state hospital privatization plan that less than a week ago was shot down by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services because of the creative but prohibited method of financing the privatization plans.

The federal action threw the state budget into chaos literally only days before the budget was to go to the House for debate on Thursday (today, May 8) because of a $400 million hole it blew in the state spending document.

Without going into specific names, suffice it to say that heads roll whenever a discouraging word is heard in Jindal’s presence and now the latest is what is becoming a very long line of teagueites, so named in honor of former Office of Group Benefits Director Tommy Teague, fired on April 15, 2011, and his wife Melody, fired about six months earlier as a grants reviewer but later reinstated.

One recent Teagueite, a friend of Crockett who must remain nameless, said of Jindal’s latest action, “There’s no other way to say it except to say the man is evil.”

Attempts by LouisianaVoice to reach Crockett Thursday for comment were unsuccessful.

 

 

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‘Bobby Jindal: the Man, the Legend’ (but mostly legend), by LouisianaVoice (via couple of Forbes magazine puff pieces)

Posted in DHH, Elections, Governor's Office, Health Care on May 6, 2014| 6 Comments »

 

Any successful stage magician must be adept at the art of misdirection so as to be able to successfully pull off his sleight of hand maneuvers while the audience’s eyes are focused elsewhere.

That being the case, just call Gov. Bobby Jindal the aspiring-but-not-quite-there-yet magician: the wannabe.

Rather than coming off as an inept stage magician, however, Jindal more closely resembles the old traveling snake oil salesman standing on the back of his wagon full of patent medicine as he assures the crowd gathered around him to “Try this: it’ll cure what’s ailing you.”

“It’s guaranteed to fix education, health care, the economy, deteriorating roads and bridges, crumbling college and university physical plant, pensions, prisons, budget deficits, the environment, poverty, coastal erosion, and population loss—all while reducing your taxes and giving more corporate tax breaks and handing out more consulting contracts.

“But don’t look at me when I’m telling you this; instead, watch what those bureaucrats in Washington are doing. They’re the one who are wrong-headed, who have no legal basis for doing what they’re doing.

“But you’d better hurry. That’s right, step right up and get your Miracle Jindal Juice ‘cause I can’t stay here long. I have to be moving on. I’ve gotta be in Iowa next week, New Hampshire after that and then Washington, New York, Los Angeles…

That’s the Bobby Jindal we all know here in Louisiana—the real Bobby Jindal and not the Bobby Jindal of mythical proportions being foisted upon the rest of the country by Forbes magazine, Fox News, Politico and the op-ed pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Of course he does have his supporters closer to home, namely a publisher of a Baton Rouge business publication who was Jindal’s campaign finance chairman and who now serves as an appointed member of the LSU Board of Stuporvisors, an editorial columnist for the Baton Rouge Advocate who doesn’t even live in Louisiana (he resides in Mobile, Alabama), and an associate professor up in Shreveport who contributes to a blog supported by a lot of really bizarre advertising (“highly valued sponsors,” they’re called). Here are a few examples:

http://www.familysurvivalkit.org/new/bclf/index_6.php?aff_id=7703&subid=tpA04252014fsc&trid=1021a45ee3d734d499e32716a484ab&k={k}

http://www.healthrevelations.net/HTML5/Encode_New/Transcript/?pco=LHRVQ470&efo=HRV140219A&xco=XHRVQ470

http://finance.moneyandmarkets.com/reports/RWR/american-revolution/?em=&c=&sc=COCO&ec=5947104

http://www.omegaflexformula.com/video/?utm_source=thejrwa&utm_medium=email&utm_term=jointmiracle&utm_content=omegaflex&utm_campaign=041814conservative

But enough of that. Let’s get back to Bobby Jindal: the Man, the Legend.

Perhaps it is only appropriate that as a child, the governor who exists in an insulated fantasy world where he is always right in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, took his name Bobby from a character on the saccharin-laden sitcom The Brady Bunch where every problem was solved and every crisis was overcome in a 30-minute time slot. Too bad it just doesn’t work that way in the real world.

If, while sitting on the living room floor as a kid, he had gotten hooked instead on The Beverly Hillbillies, Do you think Louisiana would have elected Jethro Jindal? (Before you answer that, think Swamp People and Duck Dynasty.) Jay Leno joked that it was probably a good thing Jindal didn’t watch Gilligan’s Island growing up lest he might have adopted the name “Little Buddy.”

Perhaps he should have; after all, he has been lost for six years now.

Instead of staying at home and doing his job, Jindal would rather flit about the country, telling anyone who will listen how great he is, how wonderful his programs are, and how he personally has had to overcome the dictatorial hand of Washington in general and Obama in particular.

Misdirection.

And now, the latest insult to his constituents here at home is an op-ed he penned in Sunday’s (May 4) Forbes magazine which leaves the reader (in Louisiana, anyway) wondering if Forbes is really this desperate to fill its pages with self-serving, aggrandizing claptrap.

The piece, titled How We Achieved Louisiana’s Economic Surge, is filled with misleading statistics designed to convince readers that he took over a cesspool of ineptitude six years ago and turned it into paradise on earth for every living, breathing citizen of the state.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/05/04/how-we-achieved-louisianas-economic-surge/

 

Following are excerpts from Jindal’s latest self-anointing op-ed, with our comments, in italics, following each of Roy’s observations:

  • Right off the bat, he boasts of a “surge of economic growth, and more and better-paying jobs.”
  • Yet, Louisiana is rated better than Wyoming in closing the gender pay gap. In Louisiana, women make only 67 percent of what a man makes for performing the same job (as opposed to Maryland, Nevada and Vermont where women make 85 percent of what men make, and in Washington, D.C., where it’s 90 percent.

Misdirection.

  • “Louisiana has the lowest unemployment rate in the south, tied for seventh-lowest in the nation,” he writes.
  • But Louisiana’s 18 percent poverty rate ranks fifth highest in the nation, according to data provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And Jindal’s lapdogs, the Louisiana Legislature, recently beat back efforts to raise the minimum wage.

Misdirection.

  • We shifted from a government-run hospital system to a health system that embraces ingenuity and efficiency…”
  • Yet, Jindal refused to expand Medicaid even though 18.3 percent of Louisiana citizens, mostly working poor, are without health insurance—lower than only Texas (24.6 percent), Nevada (23.5 percent), New Mexico (21.9 percent), Florida (21.5 percent), Georgia (19.2 percent), Alaska (19 percent), and Arkansas (19.4 percent). Oh, and Louisiana continues to rank number one in the nation in obesity rate.
  • “Per-capita income in our state is at its highest level ever.”
  • The Bureau of Business & Economic Research, however, lists Louisiana at 29th in the nation in per capital income last year—not last, but certainly not setting the pace, either.

Misdirection.

  • Of all the statistics about our state’s progress, I’m proudest of the six straight years of in-migration…”
  • Louisiana has seen its congressional strength drop from eight to seven and now six with some saying it may drop to five after the 2020 census. So where’s that in-migration, Governor?

As absurd as that article was, one also published by Forbes in October of 2011, seems in retrospect to be a parody of Jindal’s administration rather than a serious treatise by writer Avik Roy:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/aroy/2011/10/24/louisiana-gov-bobby-jindal-is-piling-up-an-impressive-health-reform-resume/

 

  • “At the age of 24, Louisiana Gov. Mike Foster appointed him as Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, giving him authority over 40 percent of the state’s budget. Under his direction, Louisiana’s Medicaid program went from a $400 million deficit to a $220 million surplus.”
  • Really? So, Governor, what about now? Where is that surplus today?

 

  • “National Review has published online Jim Geraghty’s lengthy profile of Governor Jindal. Geraghty discusses at lengthhow Gov. Jindal restructured Louisiana’s unique charity hospital system.”
  • In light of recent developments, we’ll bet you Geraghty’s report would make interesting reading today—if one could stop laughing long enough to finish it.

 

  • “At Earl K. Long (Hospital in Baton Rouge), 63 percent of the emergency room visits are for non-emergency care.”
  • Prisoners at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, about 40 miles from Baton Rouge, were routinely treated for all ailments and injuries—emergency and non-emergency—at Earl K. Long, thus accounting for the large percentage of non-emergency visits.

 

  • In October of 2011, “Jindal won a second term as Governor, garnering the highest percentage of votes by a gubernatorial candidate since the state introduced its current “jungle primary” system in 1978.”
  • Granted, Avik Roy has the creds, being a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and having served as health care policy advisor to Mitt Romney, but he really shouldn’t get too excited about that 2011 election. Yes, Jindal got 67 percent; but it was 67 percent of a total turnout of less than 20 percent and his strongest challenger was an unknown school teacher who had something in the neighborhood of $2500 in campaign funds against Jindal’s $11 million. Anything less than 90 percent should’ve been consider an embarrassing failure.

 

  • “Jindal was the first governor to endorse Rick Perry for President.”
  • Uh, yeah…so? And how’d that work out for them?

 

  • “In Perry’s book, Fed Up, he describes Jindal as ‘one of the brightest, most capable governors in the country.’ Keep an eye on him.”
  • Damned good advice, Mr. Roy. We’ll keep that in mind.

Misdirection.

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Notable quotables (in their own words)

Posted in Budget, Contract, Contracts, DHH, Finances, Governor's Office, Health Care, Higher Education, LSU, Notable Quotables, Privatization on May 2, 2014| 2 Comments »

 

“CMS has no legal basis for this decision.”

—Gov. Bobby Jindal, commenting on the decision by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Friday to refuse to sign off on the administration’s privatization plan for six LSU System hospitals.

 

“How fitting that Jindal’s plan to be gone before his many bombs, some supposedly planted with delayed fuses, may well blow early.”

—A political observer, commenting on the sudden collapse of Jindal’s hospital privatization plan which may have blown a $300 million hole in the state budget scheduled for debate on the House floor next Thursday.

 

“People could die. The sick will get sicker. Our precious hospitals are in turmoil. The state budget is in tatters. Governor Bobby Jindal sits in the midst of this fiscal and healthcare debacle clutching his dreams of the presidency at the taxpayers’ expense.”

—State Rep. Robert Johnson (D-Marksville), commenting in a prepared statement on the CMS decision to scuttle Jindal’s hospital privatization plan.

 

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