The Jindal Health Care Mystique

Do you remember when Jindal proposed privatizing the LSU Hospital System, and submitted a plan to our legislators that was full of blank pages relating to the funding costs and how much money it would save? A plan that now the Center for Medicaid Services unequivocally has rejected and, as a result, might jeopardize up to $500 million in federal health care funding.

Do you also remember how Jindal took one of the most successful  state-run medical insurance plans in the country, the  Group Benefits PPO,  privatized it, and depleted the medical reserve funds (monies used to pay member claims) from over one half billion dollars to less than $55 million in the two years of its operation?

Finally, do you remember the draconian cuts to the medical services for the disabled and those in need of mental health services?

All of these were approved by our legislators who bought into the hype that Bobby was a highly intelligent Rhodes Scholar and a proven guru in designing health care delivery systems.

Well, apparently we have a bunch of slow learners as our representatives, for now they are considering Senate Bill 682 which contains Jindal’s counter proposal to Obamacare, dubbed Bobbycare.

The only problem is there are NO definitive costs included in the plan, and it contains few specifics, only generalizations.  I guess our esteemed legislators will just have to adopt Pelosi’s philosophy, “We have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it.”  Or, in this case, to found out how much it will cost and how it will work.  Talk about a bunch of hypocrites.

And to make matters worse, both of Bobby’s leading puppets, Department of Health and Hospitals Secretary, Kathy Kliebert, and Commissioner of Administration, Kristy Nichols, have assured our legislators that the state budget can afford, the yet UNKNOWN, costs.

This assurance from two individuals who have helped push a budget that has seemed more like a comedy sketch than a professionally conducted process, beginning with the DOUBLE COUNTING of money collected during last year's tax amnesty program. That error created a $43 million deficit in Jindal’s proposed health and hospitals budget for the upcoming fiscal year.

How much longer will it take for our legislators to come to the conclusion that when it comes to delivering quality, financially sound, health care services to Louisiana citizens, Bobby hasn’t a clue?  

McCarthyism is Alive and Well in the Governor’s Office

Bobby Jindal came out swinging Wednesday with his strongest reason yet for ditching the Common Core Standards.  According to Bobby, they smack of Communism, with his latest linking of the Common Core to centralized planning in Russia.  So following through with Bobby’s Rhodes Scholar logic, one can only assume that if you support the Common Core Standards, Governor Jindal claims that you are adopting Russian government strategies, and, if that's so, it would logically follow that you’re now a COMMUNIST SYMPATHIZER.

Gee, I thought we put McCarthyism to rest years ago.

 According to The Herblock Book (1952), McCarthyism is, “the practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence.  During the McCarthy era, thousands of Americans were accused of being communists or communist sympathizers and became the subject of aggressive investigations and questioning before government or private-industry panels, committees and agencies. The primary targets of such suspicions were government employees, those in the entertainment industry, union activists, and EDUCATORS (my caps).”

Don’t’ you find it interesting how Jindal has now linked the Common Core Standards, educators, and Communism together?   And we, as loyal U.S. citizens, sure don’t want any of that Communism stuff in this Bayou State. 
 

The late U.S. Senator, Joseph McCarthy, would have been so proud!

The tragedy of this latest verbal tantrum by Bobby is that, since his administration has so severely cut funding for mental health services, it will most likely take months before he can get psychiatric help.

Louisiana Can't Do a Better Job !

In an interview last Friday, Governor Jindal repeated the 'status quo' line that we should abandon the Common Core Standards because the state can do a better job of developing its own academic standards.

To all those who continue to support this argument, I have one question, “Where have you been living for the last 25 years?” It certainly must not have been in Louisiana.  Does the acronym LEAP (Louisiana Educational Assessment Program) sound familiar?  That was a state-developed paradigm of standards, and assessments exactly like what Jindal and others are now advocating for as the alternative to the Common Core Standards.

LEAP came to life in 1989 legislation touting all the same themes the present Core bashers seem to believe, namely, that Louisiana, knows best how to educate its youth, and has the skills to do just that.  LEAP turned out to be a perfect example of an educational house of horrors.

I can only assume that Jindal, like some of the other Core critiques, had his children in private school, and therefore probably has little or no conception of the failings of the state-designed LEAP.

After millions of tax payers’ monies spent, 20 or more years of holding thousands of students back at the fourth grade and eighth grade, and denying thousands more graduation from high school until they mastered the LEAP standards, Louisiana’s 4^th and 8th graders are still either 48^th or LAST in their reading and math skills on the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) testing of the 50 states.

This empirical data clearly indicates that Louisiana doesn’t have the educational leadership to do what Jindal advocates and he best decide to stick with the Common Core Standards to serve as guides for local school districts in developing curriculums.

Additionally, Jindal, like so many others ranting about the Common Core Standards, doesn’t understand the difference between a curriculum and a standard.  The standards are NOT a curriculum.  Louisiana educators are totally responsible for deciding how the standards are taught.  If parents are don’t like the methods utilized to teach the students, and find them confusing, that is the fault of the ‘experts’ in Louisiana, not the standards themselves.

Please, if you are opposed to the Common Core Standards, don’t continue to use the argument that Louisiana can do a better job by designing their own standards and assessments, for there is LITTLE to NO evidence to support that claim.

Businesses May Love Louisiana, but State Suffers

Being trained specifically in the field of research and statistics, I am well acquainted with the practice of, what I like to call, omission statistics, to justify your case.   In a recent photo opt, the mayor of New Orleans, Mitch Landrieu and our phantom governor, Bobby Jindal, who always, magically, instantly appears for photo opts, celebrated Chiquita Brands International returning its shipping operations to the port of New Orleans.  

Of course, Bobby was all a glow in touting how his tax incentive economic plans for Louisiana were paying off.  However, what I noted about all this exciting news was the total lack of any statistics related to just how much our state was going to benefit, economically, from this venture.  There were vague references to it creating less than a hundred new jobs, but the only specified statistic relating to this event was the fact that the business was going to benefit greatly by getting over $15.5 million of tax payers’ money over the next 10 years to relocate the company here. 

I’m sure that Bobby and Mitch would be the first to point out that one has to spend money to make money.  However, why don’t we ever hear statistics relating to projected income for the state from these new tax incentive ventures BEFORE we grant them?  And why aren’t income figures monitored and reported back to the public from the tax incentive ventures that are already in place, and touted continuously by our Governor and legislators as successful? 

When the statistics for one such venture did make it to the media, namely, the movie making tax incentive program, we discovered that it produced a return of approximately 28 cents on each dollar spent by the state, a losing proposition. 

While Louisiana receives high marks for its favorable work environment from economic development magazines, it  continues to hemorrhage financially, resulting in continuing infrastructure decay, along with a downward spiraling of educational and healthcare services under the Jindal Administration. 

Consequently, one has to wonder when our elected legislators will stop giving money away blindly without full economic disclosure.

Don't Blame This on Obama

As I talk with many of my friends and acquaintances, I hear the Obama Administration being blamed more and more for naturally occurring events in our society.  The list now includes the increase in the price of gasoline along with the increased price of groceries in the super market.  I can’t wait for the list to expand to include the weather.

However, let’s discuss one event, that will occur, that will NOT be the fault of the Obama Administration.  It involves the Group Benefits Medical Insurance Plan in Louisiana. The plan provides medical insurance for over 250,000 state employees and their dependents.  Two years ago it was touted as one of the best run plans in the United States with a cash reserve of over a half billion dollars (monies available to pay  retirees’ medical expenses).

Bobby and his ‘experts’ reorganized the plan and now the cash reserve is less than half of what it used to be and continues to dwindle.   Jindal’s leading health care puppet, Kristy Nichols, Commissioner of Administration, blames the sudden decrease in the reserve on the aging, “very ill state worker population.”

However, what Nichols fails to tell you is that the overall characteristics of this insured population has NOT change statistically from previous years.  The only factor that did change was Governor Jindal’s expert reorganization of the entire system, which, by the way, he touts, is just the beginning of some even bigger overall retirees’ health plan reorganization. 

Please don’t forget that Jindal is a master of deception.   As a way to help balance his smoke and mirrors state budget, Bobby REDUCED the insurance premiums of those in the plan by 8% for the last two years.  Since the state pays up to 75% of the premiums for some of the plan's members, this reduced the state's cost in the budget.  However this budget trick resulted in depletion of the reserve funds even faster.

It doesn’t take a Rhodes Scholar to figure out how Kristy and Bobby plan to resolve the Bobbycare mess they’ve created.  They will have to significantly raise the insurance premiums and reduce the benefits to continue to pay the health costs for this newly Nichols-created buzz term “very ill state worker population.”

So let’s be perfectly clear, when Group Benefits suddenly reduces state retirees’ health care coverage, increases their co-payments, and raises their premiums,  please,  let’s not drag out the Obama excuse, but, instead, put the blame squarely where it belongs, Bobbycare.

UPDATE: As of 5/24/14, the cash reserve is $55 million.

'Nero Fiddles as Rome Burns,’ Aptly Applies to Our Legislators

As state representative Brett Geymann of Lake Charles continues his one man assault on purportedly making our children safe from the evils of Common Core, using already debunked falsehoods, and sometimes outright fabricated lies, to panic Louisianans to rally around his cause, he seems to miss the bigger picture, namely, the collapse of Jindal’s latest budget proposal to run our state next fiscal year.

Perhaps, if Jindal’s present state number crunchers had had the benefits of the Common Core Standards as part of their education, they wouldn’t have made the following errors in Jindal’s latest budget proposal:

A $40 million mistake in their calculations of the amount of money they projected to receive from the tax amnesty program.

A $50 million underestimate in funding for the public school budget.

A short fall of $15 million allocated to the TOPS program.

A $7 million shortfall in the state’s Sheriffs budgets to house prisoners.

Failure to adequately replenish a trust fund for the elderly used to help with nursing home care expenses.

A shortage of funds to cover the health care of individuals who will fall into the Medicaid non-coverage gap as a result of Jindal’s refusal to accept additional Medicaid funding under the Affordable Care Act.

However,  have no fear,  for  I’m sure that as soon as our legislators get done with the important issues of stopping  the Common Core plague,  dealing with a proposal to make our state book the Bible, deciding the fate of a caged tiger at a local gas station, weighing  in on the location of a group home for the mentally ill, and voting to reject a measure to make it illegal to deny selling or leasing property to same sex partners, they will rise to the occasion and deal with their  least important priority, finding  ways to once again, for the seventh time,  balance Bobby’s smoke and mirrors budget on the backs of educational and medical services in our state. 

Obviously, Jindal is in total sync with our legislators regarding the state operating budget, for he is out of town engaging in the more important issue of self- promotion.

Jindal’s Criticism of Common Core Tests Makes No Sense

Help me understand Governor Jindal’s latest attempt for national recognition.  Initially, when Common Core was being adopted by our state, Bobby was so busy traveling throughout the country, self-promoting himself, that he really didn’t pay too much attention to the matter. As the ground swell rose nationally against Common Core, Bobby needed to jump on the band wagon to foster his national image.

Since 90% of Common Core has already been implemented in his state and is fully embraced by his leading appointees, BESE members and the State Superintendent of Education, Bobby has found himself in a pickle because the heavy weights in his party are against Common Cores’ implementation.

So Bobby has come up with the novel approach that the standards might be ok, but the tests designed to measure Common Core Standards success are flawed because he says they are, “ federal, one-size fits all testing.”  I don’t quite understand what that means and, since he’s a Rhodes Scholar, I’m not sure that he even knows what that means.   The tests are designed to assess how our students perform on the standards in comparison to other students nationwide.

Do the terms, NAEP, ITBS, CAT, Stanford Assessment Series, Chicago Early Assessment, GRE, ACT and SAT ring a bell?  All of us, in Louisiana, took one or more of these  assessments sometime during our school career.  They all compared our performance to other students nationwide.

Oh and let’s not forget that it was during Governor Jindal’s term that HE mandated that ALL high school students in the state  take the ACT , a test comparing Louisiana students’ academic performance to others nationally.

Tests for Common Core are being developed by Partnership for the Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, not the feds.  This group is a multi-state consortium working together to develop a common set of K-12 assessments in English and math anchored in what it takes to be ready for college and careers.  Since I can’t find the word “federal” mentioned anywhere, I don’t understand the use of that term  in Jindal’s statement.  These tests will compare our students’ Common Core Standards performance with others throughout the nation, just like the ones mentioned above compare the academic performance among students nationwide.  So Bobby’s “one-size fits all testing” is  also a mystery to me.

But Bobby now claims that THIS national comparison assessment is no good, not based upon any item analysis as to the appropriateness of the test items, but simply that state developed assessments would be better.  State developed assessments are permitted to be used with the Common Core Standards, but past evidence falls to support the notion that this would lead to success for Louisiana students, and Governor Jindal  should know this.

We went that route for over 20 years with something known as LEAP and most of our students (68%) were highly successful according to measurement by our state assessment tests.

However, after all these years of using these tests, which showed continual improvement, when our  students were assessed  by the most recent  NATIONAL assessment, NAEP, which  Jindal hasn’t  complained about, our 4^th and 8^th grade students were either  tied for 48^th place or finished dead last in reading and math skills out of the 50 states tested.   Do you really want to trust your child’s educational future again to state assessment tests?  Haven’t these done enough damage?

If our governor really took the time to understand the issues involved with Common Core and its assessment, he might refrain from ‘shoot from the hip’ statements which really add little to the discussion of the entire paradigm.  His present protest doesn’t logically make sense and is simply a desperate attempt to save face with his political pundits.   He so aptly fits the old quote from Mark Twain-“It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool, than to open it and remove all doubt.”