New Orleans needs a new normal
20th April 2020 · 0 Comments
New Orleans’ reputation as a top tourist destination is indisputable. Even in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, people kept streaming into the city to rebuild and assist residents. People never stopped coming to the Crescent City… until COVID-19 blew into town.
As we enter the second month of a citywide “stay-at-home” order, which Mayor LaToya Cantrell extended to May 16, and if the order is not extended beyond that date, we must wonder what normal will look like.
According to New Orleans & Co., the city’s economy is driven by several sectors: energy, international trade, healthcare and tourism.
However, tourism is the city’s top revenue generator. The leisure industry generates an average of $9 billion per year, millions of visitors, and the restaurants, hotels and tourism-related businesses employ tens of thousands of workers.
No one can predict when things will be “normal” again. But a global view of the impact of the corona virus – a lack of widespread testing, the risk of reinfection, the unknown number of people who may be asymptomatic, mounting deaths and debts – and the stigma of being in the top ten of the most affected cities in the U.S., is a scarlet letter slung around the city’s borders; that bodes ill for tourism, once the city re-opens. Given the pandemic’s effect on New Orleans, it may be time for city leaders to construct a plan for a “new normal.”
What would a “new normal” look like in a city that lives and breathes based chiefly on tourism? Are visitors going to come back by the millions? Are restaurants and hotels going to be overflowing? Are the festivals going to ramp back up, sooner rather than later? Will downtown New Orleans’ streets be teeming with tourists and residents within a few months?
Who knows?
What is clear, though, is that our leaders must think outside the box and find a way to breathe new life into our city by bringing new industries here.
Can New Orleans become a manufacturing hub? We have the largest inland port in the U.S. Can we process seafood here? Can we build computers and high tech gear? Can we be Silicon Valley South? Can we get a company to open a PPE manufacturing plant here? Can we have a meat processing plant? Can we have an Amazon Distribution Warehouse? Can we have a garment district, like New York, where sewing factories create clothing and accessories? Can we use the industrial corridor near I-10 near eastern New Orleans to create an urban farm and distribute to local grocers? Can we have a solar panel manufacturing firm here? Can we have a Microsoft Training Center to teach the next generation digital arts, cybersecurity, and other 21st century skills?
We should heed the adage, never put all your eggs in the same basket. The City of New Orleans’ leadership must find a way to generate revenue other than relying principally on the tourism industry.
City leaders should encourage a variety of industries to locate here, which can increase the number of well-paying jobs and increase the quality of living.
There is no mystery why 70 percent of those infected with the coronavirus are African Americans. Discrimination and structural racism have perpetuated a permanent underclass in the Black community. Alphabets behind one’s name does not a good job guarantee. Lower pay, no opportunity for promotions, and being the last hired have had dire mental and physical consequences.
For example, there are four Black Fortune 500 CEOs versus seven, less than a decade ago. Moreover, not a single With federal government nod, consumers could lose the boost they get from drug ‘coupons’
By Michelle Andrews
Contributing Writer
(Special from khn.org) — Patients who get financial help from drug companies to cover their copayments for prescription drugs could owe a bigger chunk of their costs under a proposed federal rule.
The annual rule, which sets a wide range of standards regarding benefits and payments for most health plans for next year, would allow employers and insurers to decide that drug companies’ assistance doesn’t count toward their members’ deductible or out-of-pocket maximum spending limits. Only payments made by patients themselves would factor into those calculations.
Consumer advocates say the proposed changes will make drugs unaffordable for many people with serious medical conditions like cancer and multiple sclerosis who rely on pricey medications.
“We need to make sure that patients have access to their medications, and we know from research that if people can’t afford their medications they won’t have access to them,” said Anna Howard, principal for policy development at the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network. Going without those drug therapies “can allow the cancer to spread, and it negatively impacts their prognosis.”
In a survey of more than 3,000 cancer patients last year, 17 percent said they had used drug manufacturers’ coupons or assistance programs, according to the Cancer Action Network.
Employers and insurers have long argued that drug companies’ use of drug coupons and other assistance encourages consumers to take brand-name drugs rather than cheaper generics. But research has shown that only about half of brand-name drugs that offer copay assistance have generic alternatives.
In addition, businesses say they’re focused on fairness. Allowing employees to shrink their out-of-pocket costs by using such assistance isn’t fair to other workers who need different types of expensive care but don’t get help covering their out-of-pocket costs.
“We have to treat people equally under the plan,” said Brian Marcotte, the outgoing president and CEO of the Business Group on Health, which represents large employers. He cited a scenario in which two employees might face very different cost-sharing obligations. One, he said, could need a drug with a $10,000 price tag and receive copay assistance from the drug manufacturer. But the other employee, who needed a $10,000 surgical procedure, would receive no outside help.
According to the organization’s most recent annual survey of large employers, 34 percent last year used “copay accumulator” programs that did not count drugmakers’ assistance as part of workers’ out-of-pocket limits and 4 percent planned to move to that stance this year. An additional 15 percent said they were considering introducing such a move during the next two years.
The two sides have been tussling over this issue for several years. Patient advocates thought they had scored a victory when the final federal health plan rule for this year appeared to limit employers’ use of these programs. The rule suggested that unless there was a generic alternative to a brand-name drug, employers were required to count drugmakers’ copayment assistance toward workers’ maximum spending limit for the year.
After pushback from employers and others, the government said it would put those changes on hold and revisit the issue. Under the new proposed rule, health insurers and employers could opt not to apply drugmakers’ copay assistance payments to patients’ deductibles and out-of-pocket maximums for any drug, regardless of whether there is a generic alternative. The rule is under review at the Office of Management and Budget.
Abbey and Jeff Haudenshild, of Findlay, Ohio, have been riding this roller coaster in recent years. Their two sons, Parker, 4, and Weston, 1, have hemophilia. The boys’ medication costs roughly $32,000 every month. When Parker was 1, the drug company copayment assistance program picked up the family’s portion of the cost, which totaled roughly $8,000 for the year, Abbey Haudenshild said.
But the following year, the health insurer that covers them through Haudenshild’s job as a physical therapist opted not to allow that. The Haudenshilds found out about it only when their specialty pharmacy contacted them to say they were on the hook for the full amount of the copayments because the insurance company wasn’t counting what the drug company sent toward their costs.
“That was a shocker,” said Haudenshild, who paid with a credit card.
Since then, the couple has set up a health savings account into which they put aside money every week to save up for their drug copayments. One month’s supply of the drug to treat both boys costs them $7,500. In February, they reach their plan’s $8,000 out-of-pocket spending limit and the insurer picks up the costs for the rest of the year.
When the final rule for this year came out, Haudenshild took heart. Since both boys are on a drug called Hemlibra, which has no generic, she thought she would be able to count the drug company assistance.
But then she learned that the government wasn’t going to enforce its own rule, and she’s disappointed by the government’s proposed rule for next year.
“The most challenging part is that it’s not just one or two years that we’re facing this cost, it’s going to be every year for them,” said Haudenshild.
However, some states, including the Haudenshilds’ home of Ohio, are moving to help consumers. A bill introduced in the Ohio House of Representatives this year would require insurers to count cost-sharing payments made by individuals or others on their behalf toward their total spending limits unless there is a generic alternative.
If passed, Ohio would become the fifth state to pass a law that curbs or prohibits copay accumulator programs, according to Ben Chandhok, senior director of state legislative affairs at the Arthritis Foundation.
The others are Arizona, Illinois, Virginia and West Virginia, he said. More than a dozen states have filed bills this year that would limit the practice, Chandhok said. But state laws don’t affect the roughly two-thirds of people in plans regulated by the federal government.
In an unusual stance, the proposed federal rule would permit state laws banning or limiting copay accumulators to supersede the federal rules.
But individual state laws that apply to a limited number of state-regulated health plans don’t provide the comprehensive solution that people need across the country, said Carl Schmid, executive director of the HIV + Hepatitis Policy Institute.
“I just don’t understand why the Trump administration, when he says he wants to lower drug costs, would do something that could cost patients billions of dollars in drug costs,” Schmid said.
Kaiser Health News is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, which is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
This article originally published in the April 20, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.Black woman helms a Fortune 500 or S&P 500 corporation on a permanent basis.
“There are qualified and overqualified Black managers who can fill these positions. This is not a talent issue but an access issue,” Otha T. “Skip” Spriggs, president and CEO of the Executive Leadership Council, commented last October. Spriggs said that every ethnic group and women have been elevated in employment and managerial positions in corporate America in recent years, except African Americans.
Given that African-Americans comprise 60 percent of New Orleans’ population, if our city is to come out of the pandemic bigger and better, it can’t be business as usual. Leadership must rise to the occasion and bring ingenuity and innovativeness to the challenge of overcoming this viral attack.
We can look at this moment, this opportunity, the way Norman Vincent Peale, the author of “The Power of Positive Thinking,” might have seen it. “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars,” he said of nearly impossible goals.
Using Peale’s power of positive thinking, should our leadership take the responsibility of implementing a fund to support start-up co-op businesses in our poorest neighborhoods? As for existing mid-size businesses, should our leaders offer tax incentives based on those businesses paying a $15 per hour minimum wage? Should our leaders tie new housing development proposals or construction of new hotels, etc., to a commitment to invest in affordable housing? Should our leaders demand a reduction in the exorbitant cost of Entergy services and Sewerage & Water Board rates? Should our leaders push to make state universities and colleges tuition-free? Should our leaders use NORD facilities as free after-school childcare centers? Should our leaders encourage businesses, including the city of New Orleans, to provide childcare on their premises? Should our leaders insist on Medicaid for all?
We have a chance to give New Orleans a makeover. We can come out of this stronger, better, and more prosperous in a way that improves the quality of life for every citizen.
We need a new normal. Let’s not do the same thing and expect a different result.
We should be guided by President John F. Kennedy’s words of wisdom: “A rising tide lifts all boats.” We would add one caveat: everyone must be in the boat.
This article originally published in the April 20, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
