Reversal on DHH cuts irks lawmakers

• By MARSHA SHULER
• Advocate Capitol News Bureau
• Published: Nov 1, 2008 - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

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Health-care budget cuts pushed by the Jindal administration for weeks are no longer needed, state Department of Health and Hospitals Secretary Alan Levine said Friday.

Spending has been less than originally projected, so a proposed $81 million reduction to avoid a deficit in health-care spending is no longer needed, Levine said.

Levine wrote a letter Friday to Gov. Bobby Jindal and legislative leaders that instead of a deficit he is looking at a surplus of “just more than $100 million” because of fewer services provided during the recent hurricanes.

Levine said hurricanes Gustav and Ike led to delays in the sign-up of some 400 developmentally disabled people for a waiver program that provides home and community based services. Therefore, the state did not spend as much money as budgeted.

“That gets us out of the hole,” Levine said. “I’ll sleep a little better knowing we don’t have that deficit, but we all have to be mindful that there are 400 people that need to get on that waiver.”

Legislative money leaders on Friday criticized Levine for jumping the gun without having a good handle on his budget.

Senate Finance Committee chairman Mike Michot, R-Lafayette, said the about-face is “going to cause the Legislature to really look closely” at future DHH projections.

“I wonder where we would have been if I had not stomped my foot so much,” said House Appropriations Committee chairman Jim Fannin, D-Jonesboro, who questioned DHH accounting practices.

Fannin also said he’s troubled by the prospect that Levine could have known about the fixes to the projected deficit “before we went through these battles.”

For weeks lawmakers questioned the need for the reduction and whether DHH projections this early in the budget year were accurate.

They noted that the $81 million deficit was a miniscule part of the $7 billion-plus Medicaid budget and that a lot could happen to erase the projected deficit by the time the budget year ends June 30.

The Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget approved $59 million of the plan last week on Levine’s third outing before the panel to stress the urgency of the move.

But the panel continued to balk at a proposal that would take $54 million annually out of Medicaid reimbursements that hospitals receive for care of the poor.