Louisiana Voice

From The Seal and the Tsar, posted Saturday by blogger Jojo:

“What happened in Anchorage … wasn’t a summit, it wasn’t diplomacy, and it sure as hell wasn’t leadership. It was a spectacle. A freak show of power inverted — the President of the United States turned into a clapping seal

“Meanwhile, NPR reported that guests at the Hotel Captain Cook — where American officials were staying — found a State Department memo with sensitive details about the Trump-Putin meeting sitting on the public printer. Classified strategy, abandoned between a Sudoku puzzle and someone’s boarding pass. Our national security, treated like lost-and-found at a La Quinta Inn.

“This is what capitulation looks like. It was grotesque pageantry: a Dollar Store dictator parade.

“Contrast that with what came before us. The Greatest Generation crossed oceans to liberate strangers they’d never met. They stormed the beaches at Normandy, where boys fresh out of high school drowned under machine-gun fire to crack open the gates of freedom. They clawed their way up the black sands of Iwo Jima, where men bled out clutching photographs of wives they’d never see again. They froze and starved through the Battle of the Bulge, surrounded, outnumbered, and still refusing to yield an inch to fascism’s advance. They fought and died with no certainty of victory, but with absolute certainty that democracy was worth the risk.

“The orange idiot said, in all seriousness, that he was “heading back to the United States” from Alaska.”

The announcement that Our Lady of the Lake (OLOL) Medical Center in Baton Rouge is planning to pay $50 million for the naming rights to the proposed new LSU basketball arena is getting some pushback, as it should.

One Baton Rouge resident, in a letter to The Baton Rouge Advocate, noted, “It’s fascinating how fast the money comes out when it’s about stadium exposure, yet when patients lose coverage, there’s suddenly a budget crunch.”

But when taken in context, the trend toward nonprofits pouring money into naming rights, the OLOL proposal, it turns out, isn’t a outlier; it’s a flipping trend, as the LOUISIANA ILLUMINATOR informed us back on Aug. 1.

It turns out, however, that the LSU facility isn’t the only proposed expenditure by the Franciscan-run hospital system in Louisiana. Just an hour’s drive to the west, we find that OLOL sister institution, Our Lady of Lourdes Regional Medical Center has committed a cool $15 million (over a 15-year period) for the planned renovation and naming rights to University of Louisiana-Lafayette’s new Ragin’ Cajuns football stadium, complete with loge boxes and club seats (some no doubt designated of medical center board members) that is scheduled to open in a couple of weeks.

And get this: less than two years ago, Our Lady of the Lourdes was ostensibly so strapped that it sent out a notice that it was shutting down its fitness center for older adults.

That decision prompted a letter of protest by New Iberia attorney Donald Akers, a letter that was also signed by 11 other attorneys, educators and doctors.

That same Baton Rouge resident also wrote that “Funding luxury amenities at a college basketball arene while people are being dropped from Medicaid isn’t just tone-deaf – it’s morally bankrupt. And doing so under the banner of a religious institution? That’s the kicker.

His isn’t the only push-back, of course. The nonprofit hospital themselves are RESISTING EFFORTS at oversight, oversight that has shown in a 2022 report that found that most nonprofit hospital systems failed to spend as much on their communities as they received in tax breaks and that fully half of hospitals spend only 1.4 percent of total expenses on CHARITY CARE.

In 2022, for another example, LSU announced that OLOL had committed a whopping $85 million which will “solely and directly support world-class care for all of LSU’s STUDENT-ATHLETESin the decade ahead. At the same time, OLOL did pledge a like amount to support a Student Health Center at the university, bring the total commitment to $170 million.

And while that’s all well and good, it’s still a head-scratcher to try and understand how an institution can claim a nonprofit status and yet have all that money lying around for the benefit of a chosen few.

Well, let’s compare. While we don’t have access to the organizational summary for OLOL, we do know that Our Lady of the Lourdes has 391 beds and that its total revenue for 2023 was $577.7 million against total expenses of $525.1 million for that same year for a “nonprofit” difference of $52.6 million in net income.

OLOL’s 2023 INCOME for its 1,020 beds was $1.68 billion (with a “B”) against expenses of $1.59 billion, for a “nonprofit” difference of a cool $90 million. To the lay person, it’s pretty difficult to see the nonprofit in either institution, especially after one takes a close look at an itemized bill after a hospital stay. Better yet, take a gander at your medical insurance premiums. All that money being spent to promote sporting events has to come from somewhere.

This whole mentality of jumping in to pour millions into sports programs is part of an overall system that is out of whack, to say the least.

Just today (Aug. 17), The Washington Post ran a lengthy story (sorry, I’m unable to link it here because it’s a paywall) noting that the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is a nonprofit with an annual net income of $1.3 billion from the sale of television rights, advertising, tickets, merchandise and membership dues (think Tiger Athletic Foundation). And that’s over and above expenses.

Get this. This year is the first year of a broadcast and marketing rights contract with CBS for an eye-popping $8.375 billion to go with an eight-year contract with ESPN for another $920 million. In 2022, the then-Power Five collegiate athletic conferences generated more than $3.5 billion in combined revenue and the College Football Playoffs pumped in another $1.3 billion.

And it’s all nonprofit. Oh, the IRS has attempted to tax broadcast rights or sponsorships of college bowl games but Congress, in its infinite wisdom and rare show of unity, exempted sponsorships.

So, the show goes on as more and more nonprofit health care systems and hospital groups fall over each other in a mad rush to slap their names on sports venues in California, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, New York, North Carolina, Pennsysvania, Tennessee and, of course, Louisiana – even as the nation is staring down the barrel of a health-care crisis.

This isn’t an advocacy for socialized medicine (though some countries have had a successful track record with that), but rather, it’s a question of where is the sense of responsibility to the community as a whole, the marginally-served, as opposed to the privileged few?

Just how is the pasting of the OLOL brand on a basketball arena or Our Lady of the Lourdes on a football stadium going to provide health care to those in need but who cannot afford it, to those who lose their Medicaid coverage, as that reader correctly point out?

This spike could be caused by two things: Tarriffs, of course, is one. The other might well be the lack of labor to harvest your veggies. That, too, drives costs.

Ol’ Yam Tits poses with his new leader of the Bureau of Labor Statistics E.J. Antoni.

Don the Con says Antoni was a mere bystander on Jan. 6.

Here he is, standing by.

Smile! You’re on camera!

Three grown-ass men are falling over each other in their childishly submissive attempts to win the anointment of Donald Trump in their efforts to oust U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy in next year’s mid-term elections.

It’s truly a sad to watch these men who eschew issues like inflation, unemployment, homelessness, human rights and dignity, civil rights and even our very freedom and future in favor of bootlicking in hopes of getting the endorsement of a convicted felon.

The candidates are State Sen. Blake Miguez of New Iberia, State Treasurer John Fleming and Public Service Commission member Eric Skrmetta of New Orleans.

Miguez says he is “the MAGA choice,” whatever that may mean. Fleming, for his part, sniffs that he helped develop the MAGA movement way back when, as a member of Congress, he founded the House Freedom Caucus. That’s nothing, says Skrmetta, who point out that it was he who gave the speech that pledge the state’s 47 delegates to Trump at the 2024 Republican National Convention. (Credit the Baton Rouge Advocate)

Wow. With those credentials, how can we Louisianans lose? (Sometimes, you just have to inject sarcasm.)

You might have noticed that not one of those three Repugnantcans cited a single qualification other than their blind loyalty to a clown. Nothing about pledging to support the Constitution or to advance the interests of the gret stet of Looziana. Nothing about addressing real problems.

It would be interesting to hear them address the dangers of chemical pollution along the Mississippi River that has come to be known as “Cancer Alley.”

It would’ve been great to hear them pledge to fight to save our vanishing coastline.

It would’ve been refreshing to hear them condemn the treatment of people of a darker skin tone by a rogue outfit calling itself ICE, but who the hell knows who they really are with their faces covered and having no warrants to justify their harassment and brutality.

And it would at least be interesting to hear them address the issues of education, poverty and others in which the state ranks near or at the bottom of all such lists.

It escapes all logic to understand why any adult would attempt to advance his or her career by swearing allegiance to someone of such dark character as Pumpkin McPornhumper who appears to possess the mental acuity of a child.

Regrettably, that seems to be precisely what we have come down to in selecting our leaders. We are living in a political vacuum where common sense has been replaced by pathetic fealty to an individual over allegiance to principles and ideals or to the country.

One has to wonder how many recite the Pledge of Allegiance without ever thinking about what the words, “and to the republic for which it (the flag) stands” really mean.