Report: Louisiana Is Less Healthy than Previously Thought

A report from the United Health Foundation finds Louisiana’s national health rankings dropped to 49th in the last year.

The ranking puts Louisiana second to only Mississippi in having the worst health outcomes of any state in the nation.

State health chief Bruce Greenstein said that the falloff from 47th in 2009 is a sure sign that the state cannot afford to continue a Medicaid health insurance program for the poor “that continues to reward volume over value and quantity over quality.”

The state should implement “coordinated care networks,” which would match patients with physicians who would manage their care, Greenstein said during a telephone news conference.

“Today is really a wake-up call for all of us, particularly those who fight to keep the status quo,” Greenstein said.

Louisiana Hospital Association president John Matessino said a lot of the ranking has nothing to do with the delivery of health care. He said the study includes high school graduation rates, occupational deaths and deaths related to violent crime.

“It aggravates me when they take things like this and try to make them say something else,” said Matessino, referring to Jindal administration officials.

The United Health Foundation report found Louisiana had “strengths” in ready access to prenatal care with 86.8 percent coverage; a high immunization rate with 93.2 percent of children getting required shots; and high per capita public health funding at $95.

Louisiana’s “challenges” included a high rate of obesity that increased from 28.9 percent in the 2009 report to 33.9 percent this year; a high infant mortality rate at 9.5 deaths per 1,000 live births; and higher cancer and cardiovascular deaths at 220.1 deaths per 100,000 and 334.8 per 100,0000, respectively.

Louisiana was not alone among southern states in low rankings. Besides Mississippi at 50th, Arkansas ranked 48th, Alabama came in at 45th; Tennessee at 42nd, South Carolina at 41st and Florida at 37th. Neighboring Texas stood at 40th.

The three states with the highest rankings were in the northeast Vermont, first; Maine, second; and New Hampshire, third.

Greenstein said the top states have certain cultural and lifestyle advantages over Louisiana, but they have also made “great strides to reform their Medicaid system.”

He said other states that Louisiana has “a lot in common with” are moving up in the rankings because of changes made in their health care delivery system for the poor such as Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee.

Greenstein said the Jindal administration is in the process of developing a Louisiana-designed “coordinated care” plan to present to the Legislature in January.

The plan affects two-thirds of the state’s 1.2 million Medicaid recipients, he said. More than 600,000 of the Medicaid recipients impacted would be children, he said.

Information from: The Advocate