Levine: Health proposal hurts La.

BATON ROUGE -- Louisiana's top health care official blasted the leading Democratic health care proposal in Congress on Tuesday, saying it carves out special favors for states represented by powerful legislators while ignoring the financial calamity facing less fortunate states.

Health and Hospitals Secretary Alan Levine said the Senate bill authored by Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont., includes language that would exempt select states from having to share in the cost of adding new people to their Medicaid rolls. But the bill includes nothing to help Louisiana avoid a Medicaid shortfall caused in part by the overheated post-Katrina economy.

Levine said if the bill passes in its current form, he will ask his agency's lawyers to investigate whether a legal case can be made that it violates the Constitution's guarantee of equal protection under the law.

"It is simply outrageous for states to be deliberately hand-picked for special treatment and other states that have legitimate natural disaster recovery issues resulting from federal failures to be utterly ignored," Levine wrote in an e-mail exchange.

As the health care bill currently stands, it would expand the Medicaid program to cover everyone at or below 133 percent of the federal poverty rate starting in 2014. But it also includes a provision, authored by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., that exempts certain states with high unemployment rates and low Medicaid enrollment from having to pay the extra costs of adding new people to the rolls.

The provision would affect only four states -- Nevada, Rhode Island, Michigan and Oregon -- while the rest of the states would have to pay part of the cost of covering more people.

Louisiana, according to the bill, would have to pay 5 percent of the cost of covering the new enrollees, with the federal government paying the rest. Levine said the change would cost Louisiana $614 million over five years and possibly more, though the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office puts the number considerably lower....