As the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. Jack McFarland understands the important role of federal health care dollars in Louisiana’s budget. The Winnfield Republican, who also runs a logging contractor firm, also understands how the Affordable Care Act’s failure to drive down premiums puts many small-business employees in tough situations. The Times-Picayune | Baton Rouge Advocate’s Mark Ballard reports:
The policy McFarland provided employees went from about $37,000 annually in 2011 to about $132,000 in 2024. McFarland said his company had to stop covering premiums for his employees and now just pays a little to help. When some of his workers wanted to lower their costs by shifting to the ACA marketplace, they could not because his company offered health insurance, he said. “As an employer, I would have to stop offering health insurance to all my employees for them to be eligible for subsidies,” McFarland said, adding that now many of his employees have no insurance.
More than 24 million Americans, including 292,994 Louisianans, who purchase health coverage through the ACA Marketplace face skyrocketing premium costs starting in January due to expiring federal subsidies. McFarland comments on the congressional gridlock surrounding enhanced premium tax credits:
“Everybody’s just went to their corner and they’re just not coming out,” McFarland said. “It’s a broken system that needs to be fixed, not patched, for the people and for small businesses. They need to sit down and figure this out.”
Cutting into inequities of HBCU funding
MacKenzie Scott, the billionaire philanthropist who helped build Amazon with her former husband Jeff Bezos, has made sizable donations to numerous historically black colleges and universities. The latest is a $38 million donation to Xavier University in New Orleans. The Times-Picayune | Baton Rouge Advocate’s Will Sutton explains how the money will help narrow funding inequities of HBCUs:
Lots of HBCUs are underfunded, but none more than land-grant HBCUs that were supposed to get equal financial support from states and the federal government. Even the U.S. Department of Education had to admit that land-grant HBCUs in 16 states have been underfunded by about $12 billion. … Every penny, dollar, $20 or $100 helps HBCUs that have been woefully underfunded throughout their histories.
Sutton says Scott’s investment underscores the value HBCUs bring to the U.S. education system:
And she definitely wouldn’t have given Xavier and other HBCUs another round of millions if she didn’t think that her first investment was paying off. Let there be no doubt that Xavier and the nation’s other HBCUs continue to provide tremendous value while having a significantly disproportionate impact on the future of our country.
Louisiana is paroling prisoners in order to deport them
The Louisiana Legislature, at the behest of Gov. Jeff Landry, passed new laws in 2024 that severely restricted parole and gutted good-time credits for incarcerated people. But as Richard A. Webster and Bobbi-Jeanne Misick of Verite News explain, this year lawmakers quietly agreed to make a major exception. A new law grants quick parole to immigrant detainees in order to deport them:
In June, Louisiana lawmakers created an expedited “alien removal process” through the special parole panel that passed with little notice during the last legislative session. “They have the ability to release a lot of people to parole, and they’re choosing to only do it for this specific group because it’s politically popular,” said Bridget Geraghty, senior counsel with the MacArthur Justice Center, a Chicago-based legal nonprofit focused on prison reform.
Verite’s team explains how the parole process for immigrant detainees differs from the regular process:
A parole board is normally tasked with deciding whether prisoners are ready for release based on a number of factors including their behavior behind bars, efforts to rehabilitate, whether they pose a risk to the public and victims’ opinions. During the August hearings, however, the board was not required to abide by the eligibility restrictions imposed by the Legislature last year, including the requirement that prisoners have clean disciplinary records for at least three years and low-risk scores as determined by an algorithm.
Locals feel negative effects of data-center construction
The construction of Meta’s $27 billion artificial intelligence data center is putting a dangerous strain on roads in the small town of Holly Ridge. Drew Hawkins of WWNO-FM explains how vehicle crashes near the Hyperion site have increased by more than 600%:
Some happened because the large trucks couldn’t see the smaller vehicles or hear their horns before backing or turning into them. Some, because the driver, who was en route to his workplace at the Meta site, was tired. Others are more alarming: A hit-and-run where the dump truck left the scene; an 18-wheeler trying to beat an oncoming train across the railroad tracks before deciding against it and backing into another vehicle; a driver leaving the scene, abandoning his wrecked vehicle in the median, so he wouldn’t miss a morning meeting at the Meta site.
The data center will require an incredible amount of energy to operate:
Though construction won’t be complete until at least 2030, Hyperion will use about three times the amount of power than the entire city of New Orleans uses in a year. To feed the behemoth’s energy demand, the power company, Entergy, plans to spend $3.2 billion to build three new gas-powered plants. Meta signed a contract with Entergy that has not been publicly disclosed, so it’s unknown how much the international company worth trillions is paying for the additional infrastructure.
Locals, such as Joseph and Robin Williams, are already seeing negative effects on their utilities:
Since Meta began construction, they said their water sometimes turns “rust-colored” and their electricity cuts off with no warning.“Entergy goes out here all the time. I guess with them now, they’re constantly turning off the power,” Joseph Williams said, pointing to the expanse of dirt, trucks and heavy construction equipment at the Meta site — what was once trees and fields in front of their home. In one recent instance, they said their power was out for three days.
Number of the Day
3.9% – Percentage of medical visits for flu symptoms in Louisiana in the week ending Nov. 15, the highest rate in the nation. (Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention via The Advocate)