re: Ochsner to layoff 2% of its workforce today

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I just changed doctors to get out of the oschner system

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It’s really a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde situation with Ochsner.

From a healthcare perspective, they are fantastic. I, and many others I know, have had great experiences on the patient side.

Now, administratively it’s an entirely different story. The new system CEO inherited a mess from Warner Thomas, who was a true piece of shite. I know workers who’ve been screwed, and other organizations in service contracts with Ochsner who have to fight tooth and nail to get them to pay money owed…to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars. IMO, a lot in the C suite there should have been the first to go.

I hate the layoffs because I’m sure the ones who are waking up to a layoff aren’t the ones responsible for Ochsner’s administrative mess.

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Our second child was born 2 weeks ago

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'Grats on da sex

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the admin bloat was there way before covid.

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That’s what I said. The Covid money was to increase front line people. They’re still offering bonuses for new nurses. It’s not the issue here. Again, more than anything else combined, it’s inflation.

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Only other company layoff I have been a part of most people got 6 months

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I have been on both sides of hundreds of layoffs and all anyone I ever laid off or all I ever got when being laid off as my the last paycheck. Sometimes it'd be 2 if pay day hadn't passed yet...

My wife works for them too. She didn’t get an invite to a 9:00 meeting so I guess she is good ….. for now. Wonder if there will be a second round of cuts down the road

This boils down to a shite ton of reasons, but the three main ones are below

1. Boomer population again from private insurance (where healthcare makes its nut) to Medicare. That’s a huge bottom line shrunken there. Every hospital in America is worried about this

2. Louisiana has a growing population of Medicaid, while our private insurance patients move out of state/market.

3. Cost of goods and supplies are soaring

Every single company over 1,000 employees could stand to cut at minimum 10% of its employees

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The new system CEO inherited a mess from Warner Thomas

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Exactly. Warner Thomas got out before it became apparent to everyone what a mess the system was in. He left for California before he had to make the difficult decisions.

This is caused by a couple things. Mostly it’s cost of employees. To be specific, the travel nurse phenomenon caused by Covid policies. The federal government reimbursed hospitals for some of the costs associated with bringing travel nurses in to their hospitals during a time of crisis. While everyone knew that this was a temporary situation, the market adjusted for it and all nurses salaries increased, though not nearly as much. The result is that hospital systems now have a higher cost of providing professional services to their patients.

An additional factor is the same thing that affects all of us when we go to the store. Inflation. Hospital supply chains are a monster, and subject to the same market forces that other goods are. This also drives the cost of services up.

While those factors have increased the cost of doing business considerably, payment from insurers for services have not increased to keep up. There’s your deficit. Hospital systems make money by treating people. That’s their revenue stream (with some random revenue generated by other ways, but it’s driven by patient care and billable codes). So they can’t really cut clinical staff because that’s going to decrease the revenue. They have to look to other areas to cut. So what I suspect we will learn is that some of the cuts are administrative type positions and some of them are the “nice to have for your patients but not required clinically or from a regulatory standpoint.

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Every single company over 1,000 employees could stand to cut at minimum 10% of its employees

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Ochsner was bloated af 7 years ago. A local company that rapidly became a regional company but there was a ton of middle and upper management that had a local mindset and work ethic.