DHH Responds to Families USA Report on Uninsured Louisianans

In a formal statement released yesterday, DHH Secretary Alan Levine indicated that while he agrees that too many Louisianans are without health coverage, the recently released Families USA report does not give the entire picture of Louisiana's uninsured. Levine said that the most recent survey conducted by DHH and the LSU Public Policy Research Lab in 2007, reports that Louisiana had 610,703 uninsured residents at the time who were under 65 years of age - which would be one in every five adults and one in every 20 children. The Families USA report does not distinguish individuals under the age of 65 and children at the age of 19 or younger-a critical point given that 95 percent of Louisiana's children have health insurance coverage. 
 
Also unstated in the Families USA report, said Levine, is the fact that Louisiana spends $1.1 billion annually in the federally-matched DSH program, financing care for hundreds of thousands of uninsured individuals last year either through our public hospital system or through payments to private hospital providers. "Reporting on the number of people uninsured for even a short period of time without referencing the major commitment to providing access for the uninsured does not give a complete picture."
 
"Governor Jindal and I have openly supported a national dialogue about how to expand access to health insurance for every American," said Levine.  "To be clear, we support every American having access to health insurance, and we support having that debate now. We do not support simply expanding government-dominated, one-payer, rate-setting systems, like Medicaid, however, and financing this expansion by cutting rates paid to providers."