Edwards cheerleaders silenced by report

The warnings went unheeded, and the silence from those who claim to speak for Louisianans with disabilities speaks volumes about their enabling.

Recently, the Louisiana Legislative Auditor issued a scathing report about care of the disabled in congregate settings. At least 3,500 incidents of abuse or neglect occurred in the state’s care facilities over the past five years. Further, in that span the Louisiana Department of Health discovered nearly 5,000 deficiencies, of which a few hundred escalated into noncompliance issues.

Most disturbingly, the numbers grew from 2020 through 2023 (reporting requirements being implemented in 2019 made those numbers less reliable for analysis). And, LDH didn’t have the investigatory resources to compel a better reporting rate by facilities of critical incidents within 48 hours of occurrence (about a quarter missed the deadline) and it only conducted an independent full-scale investigation in fewer than one percent of instances.

LDH in its responses indicated willingness to take measures of improvement, but cited monetary concerns over being able to accomplish this. Left unstated was the reason resources have become stretched so thinly over the past eight years at LDH to serve the disabled: Medicaid expansion.

Democrat former Gov. John Bel Edwards who inflicted it upon the state and with his allies on the political left falsely promised not only would expansion make Louisianans healthier but it also would save money. Wiser heads without a political agenda of growing government through redistributing wealth knew better, and the data bears out their prescience: health indicators show no improvement while state taxpayers fork over an extra $400 million annually to pay for it all.

If only a fraction of these dollars instead had gone towards monitoring capabilities of facilities, Edwards’ LDH would have achieved better outcomes. Or from another angle, if another fraction of those dollars instead had been spent on raising reimbursement rates for home- and community-based services that allow the disabled to live outside of institutions, the number of incidents would have been fewer.

Instead, improving the ability of the disabled to live in the community and in better institutional settings was put on the back burner by the Edwards Administration in its pell-mell rush to get as many Louisianans onto Medicaid as possible. Worse, organizations that should have known better and seen this coming were cheerleaders then but silent about the consequences now.

A news story about the report gave The Arc of Louisiana, Disability Rights Louisiana, and the chairwoman of the Louisiana Developmental Disabilities Council a chance to comment on the report’s rendition of laxity under Edwards. DRL officially gave no comment and the other two didn’t respond.

Of course. The two nonprofits generally supported Edwards’ agenda throughout his two terms and the LADDC is stocked with Edwards appointees that only this month will start to be evaluated for continued membership if they desire it (also, DRLA has a representative on it). Having to criticize the Edwards Administration when it fell down on the job obviously is too much for them.

Unfortunately, only with difficulty could Louisiana get out from under expansion, so the Republican Gov. Jeff Landry Administration is unlikely to seek that. There are some things that he could do, however, to reduce its cost to taxpayers that he didn’t pursue in this year’s legislative session but which may become more of an imperative with budgetary pressures building for next year, and with the hope some redirection towards services for the disabled occur. Hopefully, his choices work out better for the state’s people with disabilities than they fared with Edwards.