Show Me the Money - Tucker Page

Oddly enough, it took a weekend in Chicago at my cousin’s wedding to really appreciate the dire situation in New Orleans. Here in NOLA, nothing seems strange, nothing seems surprising, and nothing seems out of place. Gutted houses don’t catch your eye as often when you’ve already seen hundreds of them. The ubiquitous X symbols used by search and rescue teams to mark houses in the hurricane’s aftermath serve as a constant reminder that we’re still in New Orleans, but no longer carry the emotional weight for me that perhaps they should. So many people have told me that Xavier is in a bad part of town that I no longer believe them. After two weeks, New Orleans already feels like home.

The barrage of questions from family members over the weekend, though, put everything here in perspective. When my mom asked me about the shortage of doctors in New Orleans, I responded factually that there are currently no operational public hospitals within city limits. “There aren’t any hospitals?!” she responded incredulously. “That’s crazy!” And indeed it is. The notion that a city with over two-hundred thousand residents has gone two years without a functioning public hospital should shock anyone. But after working for two weeks in the Health Department and seeing firsthand the shortages of both staff and money, I would find it far more shocking if there were not a lack of doctors and open hospitals.

I would like to think that my lack of surprise at the current situation in New Orleans is not a reflection of ambivalence, but rather of my realization that New Orleanians aren’t responsible for many of their city’s problems. (Let the FEMA rant begin.) The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), for those of you who don’t know, is supposed to be helping the City of New Orleans rebuild. However, just last week I compiled a spreadsheet that highlighted the gap between FEMA estimates of hurricane damage incurred by the Health Department and money that the department had actually received from FEMA; for the Health Department alone, the total gap exceeds $5 million. Read that figure again and then ask yourself if you’re still surprised that New Orleans doesn’t have a single operational public hospital.

If you still aren’t convinced, consider the way in which FEMA pays New Orleans for repairs. For some inexplicable reason, FEMA is only in the business of reimbursement; FEMA will not give you money upfront to rebuild a hospital, for example, but it will reimburse you for however much it costs you to rebuild. Of course, any Duke Engage student knows that this payment method is problematic. Let’s say I know that Duke will reimburse me for food, but that I have completely run out of money and that I will not receive my latest reimbursement check for another week. I can’t just walk into a café, tell the cashier that I have no money but that I will bring some as soon as I get reimbursed, and then expect to be served. The FEMA reimbursement plan has the same effect. The fact that FEMA has offered to reimburse the City of New Orleans is inconsequential because the city can't afford to rebuild anything to begin with. Many other factors no doubt contribute to the problems that continue to plague New Orleans, but the federal government certainly isn’t helping.

-Tucker Page