The Louisiana Hospital Association hopes to combine a YouTube video, viral marketing, and social media with thousands of worried hospital employees to head off the Jindal administration's planned Medicaid budget cuts.

 

“We are growing ever so worried about the ability of hospitals to continue to deliver services at the level at which they're delivering them with the cuts that are continuing to go out,” hospital association president John Matessino said. “So we tried our hand at a little YouTube to try to see if we could raise some awareness about the issues.”

 

The idea is to get people to understand that every time the hospitals are hit with major cuts, there's a real threat to the facilities, Matessino said. 

 

Under the proposed budget, Medicaid spending would total $6.2 billion, roughly $300 million less than a year ago. Hospitals, nursing homes and other private healthcare providers would take about a $100 million hit.

 

Department of Health and Hospitals Secretary Alan Levine has described the cuts, which average about 3 percent, as modest. But Matessino said that's not the whole story.

 

In February, community hospitals took a 5 percent reimbursement cut, Matessino said. The other thing that state officials don't mention is that the cuts fall on 44 hospitals, the facilities that aren't owned by the state and aren't in rural areas.

 

Those hospitals have had to absorb $140 million in Medicaid service cuts since February 2009, Matessino said. For many hospitals, that amounts to a drastic 15 percent rate cut.

 

Hospitals are being reimbursed at lower rates now than they were in the early to mid-1990s.

 

“It's just a very unfair situation that we're dealing with now, that those 44 hospitals are basically being singled out to balance the state's budget,” Matessino said.

 

Levine has said that Medicaid spending still remains almost 19 percent higher than levels before Hurricane Katrina. After the storm, the federal government dumped hundreds of millions of hurricane-recovery funds into the state.

 

The hospital association video includes images of a baby in a neonatal intensive care unit, disaster victims and an elderly man in a hospital bed, accompanied by captions like when people face despair, they find hope (in hospitals). The video urges people to call or e-mail Jindal and tell him to “Stop Cutting Louisiana's Community Hospitals and Restore Their Funding! Your life may depend on it.”

 

At this point, it doesn't appear that the video, which has been viewed less than 1,500 times, will go viral.

 

Brent Sims, vice president marketing for Rockit Science Agency, said viral marketing campaigns got their label because they are contagious; information spreads by word of mouth, via e-mail, and the same goes for social media, Twitter, FaceBook, and blogs.

 

“We look at those as additional tactics that kind of help our overall brand approach for a product,” Sims said.

 

But e-mail, YouTube videos or social media are not enough by themselves to make a brand or a message resonate in the minds of consumers, Sims said. Generally, for a YouTube video to truly become viral, it has to have some type of comedic element, something that really draws people's attention and makes them want to forward it to their friends and co-workers.

 

“But there's no rhyme or reason to that. A lot of agencies have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what that element is, how you get things to become viral,” Sims said.

 

The hospital association's decision to send the video to people via e-mail, Twitter and FaceBook is kind of a natural progression in rallying support for a cause, Sims said. The only way to tell if the campaign is working is to measure the calls and e-mails to the governor's office.

 

Matessino said he did not know how many of the Hospital Association's members or their employees have called or e-mailed the governor.

 

“We know that some of our hospitals set up viewing areas and made telephones available to call the governor's office,” Matessino said. “I'll tell you some of our employees are beginning to be worried about their jobs. They're not uninformed as to what's going on. They continue to see these dollars being peeled off these hospitals, just a small number of hospitals.”

 

Matessino said while he agrees with the no-additional-taxes stance adopted by many of Louisiana’s elected officials, cutting the Medicaid reimbursements is no different than passing a hidden tax.

 

Employers and people with insurance wind up paying more for coverage because Medicare and Medicaid don’t cover the cost of care, not to mention care for the uninsured, Matessino said.

 

It’s unclear at present whether the Hospital Association’s campaign is working. The real test of the campaign's effectiveness will be whether the hospitals, and other providers, will be able to lessen the impact of the administration's proposed cuts.