The Jindal Papers

I hope someone is archiving the collected weekly pre-campaign national columns of Presidential Candidate Bobby Jindal for posterity. Taken together they invent the strangest but most fascinating of imaginary worlds.  In this week's installment we learn that Louisiana's "fiscal house is in order."

Second, we got our state’s fiscal house in order.  We cut the state budget by $9 billion or 26 percent, reducing the number of government jobs by over 28,000; we shifted from a government-run hospital system to a health system that embraces ingenuity and efficiency of experienced private partners.

As often as Jindal is published in the papers, one would think that maybe he'd take the time to read one. 

Don Gregory, health care adviser to the Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana, issued a statement late Friday saying the federal decision on Jindal’s efforts to privatize charity hospitals could blow a huge hole, possibly as large as $440 million eventually, in future state government budgets.

The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services late Friday questioned the Jindal administration’s use of $260.8 million in advance lease payments to prop up the deals involving six public hospitals, including those in New Orleans, Lafayette and Houma. If the decision stands, the state would have to find another way to cover those payments.

“While we hope, for the sake of the citizens of Louisiana and to avoid an extraordinary budget impact, that the administration is successful with its appeal, state leaders at this point should face the reality of this potential shortfall and start planning how we will deal with this problem in our current development of the fiscal year 2015 state budget in the Legislature,” Gregory wrote.