Congress’ effort to cut $880 billion over 10 years – largely from Medicaid – is creating anxiety for medical providers in Louisiana. GOP leaders have stated they can reach their cost-cutting goals by simply targeting fraud – a notion the Congressional Budget Office disagrees with – and that no one will lose benefits that “rightfully deserve” them.” WWNO’s Bob Pavlovich spoke with Alice Riener, Chief Executive Officer of Crescent Care, who provided a helpful reminder of where the vast majority of Medicaid fraud occurs:
RIENER: Fraud against Medicaid is mostly committed by bad actors in the healthcare space. The beneficiary fraud for those individuals on Medicaid is really negligible. It’s less than one percent. I think when we’re talking about the proposed changes, all of them are really going to impact and reduce access and reduce coverage for individuals.
Pavlovich asked Riener about what type of care and services would be lost under potential Medicaid cuts:
RIENER: If Medicaid cuts go through, what would happen is that we would go back to folks being uninsured. And when people are uninsured, they delay getting preventative care, which means they wait until things are really bad, and then they go to the emergency room. The emergency rooms are not set up for primary care or preventative care. So it’s also a very expensive way of getting care. And it prevents other trauma and other emergencies from being attended to when our emergency rooms are filled with things that could have been addressed in an outpatient primary care setting.
Invest in Louisiana’s Jan Moller and Courtney Foster discuss the far-reaching impacts of Medicaid cuts in the latest episode of the Didja Know? Podcast. Listen here.
What NOAA cuts could mean for Louisiana
The Trump administration is poised to lay off another 1,000 employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which plays a key role in weather forecasting and monitoring hurricane activity in the Gulf of Mexico. The new round of firings would follow the dismissal of 1,300 workers in recent weeks. The Times-Picayune | Baton Rouge Advocate’s Josie Abugov explains the concerns from Louisiana weather forecasters:
Still, with more cuts planned, Louisiana meteorologists, former NOAA employees and some scientific coalitions are alarmed about what changes could be ahead. They are also concerned that, even if the weather service is spared, climate research and other projects could be curtailed. “The key here is, when you start reducing personnel, you can’t help but impact the quality and frequency of the forecasts,” said Jay Grymes, Louisiana’s state climatologist. “A reduction in force for NOAA and particularly NWS would put that data availability in jeopardy.”
Abugov explains the impact that NOAA cuts are already having in Louisiana:
A NOAA office in Baton Rouge was one of nearly 800 leases that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has terminated, according to the DOGE database. The conservation field office is responsible for implementing NOAA’s fisheries service program in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, and also plays a role in storm protection and coastal efforts. … In recent weeks, some government staffers working on flood protection, coastal restoration and community resilience in the wider Gulf region said they lost their jobs.
Steering billions to private school vouchers and the wealthy
A recently introduced congressional bill would use tax avoidance to fuel school privatization, according to a new report from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. The Educational Choice for Children Act of 2025 would create an unprecedented 100% tax credit for donations to nonprofits that provide private school vouchers, costing $136.3 billion over the next decade. The authors explain:
“This is indefensible tax policy, and wasteful to the core,” said Carl Davis, research director at ITEP and author of the report. “If this bill were enacted, opportunists would flock to use this profitable tax shelter regardless of whether they had any actual interest in supporting private K-12 school vouchers. That’s the inevitable result of the government agreeing to pay out $136 billion in tax cuts in return for $126 billion of contributions to voucher funds. This is an egregious attempt to harness wealthy families’ interest in tax avoidance and personal profit as a means of driving interest in a cause that remains unpopular with the public.”
Louisiana would lose $5.9 billion in lost capital gains tax revenue over the next decade under the Educational Choice for Children Act.
Increasing child care supply will take investment
Some policymakers are proposing deregulation as the solution to a nationwide shortage of child care. This could come in the form of eliminating maximum child-to-staff ratios, which benefit both kids and staff members. The Urban Institute’s Sarah Prendergast and Gina Adams explain why making further investments in child care is a better way to increase the child care supply:
Ultimately, the child care supply crisis is driven by a lack of funding (PDF). Only investing more—in proven and effective ways—will solve this core problem. Raising thresholds or eliminating state-level child-to-staff ratios may allow individual programs to bring down costs or enroll more children in the short term, but this solution also places children’s safety and development at risk, contradicts parents’ child care preferences, and may well lead to more teacher shortages and program closures in the long term. State and federal policymakers have alternatives to improve child care supply; they just need to invest.
Number of the Day
82,353 – Number of Louisianans, as of Wednesday morning, who have cast ballots during early voting for the March 29 statewide ballot. (Source: Louisiana Secretary of State)