Honore: Ex-La. governor halted hospital reopening

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- Weeks after Hurricane Katrina slammed New Orleans and worsened the medical plight of the city's poor, then-Gov. Kathleen Blanco said the publicly run Charity Hospital would not reopen, even though the military had scrubbed the building to medical-ready standards, the retired Army general who oversaw the work said.

In a recent interview with The Associated Press, Lt. Gen. Russel Honore said Blanco told him in late September 2005 the 20-story building that served the region's poor residents would not reopen.

"'Ma'am, we got the hospital clean, my people report ... if you want to use it,'" Honore recalled telling Blanco. "Her reply to me: 'Well general, we're not going to open it, we're working on a different plan.'"

Honore's revelation raises questions of whether state officials used Katrina as an excuse to leverage federal financing for a new public hospital.

One of the heros of Katrina, Ret. LT Gen. Russell "Don't get stuck on stupid!" Honore tells The AP that then Louisanna Governor Kathleen Blanco REFUSED to reopen a hospital in a poverty stricken area after the hospital was completely cleaned and restored by our military. The general claims that Blanco did not want the hospital reopened because they wanted to muscle more federal dollars from the recovery. Click on the link for the whole misserable story.

Dr. James Moises, a former Charity emergency room doctor who helped clean the hospital after Katrina, said Charity was made useable, and the medical staff was eager to see it back in use.

Moises said state officials used Katrina as an excuse to close Charity and ask FEMA for the money to build a new medical complex. Moises said: "It was their orchestrated plan. It was, 'How can we manipulate the disaster for institutional gains?'"

I knew this was their game from the beginning. I've been in that hospital building - there's no way that some temporary flooding or roof damage could do any permanent harm. It's built like a fortress. So it's not the latest, glossy example of the architect's art... the patients don't care how pretty or new the building is.

All that greed has done is cripple the nearby teaching hospitals. LSU and Tulane medical centers depended heavily on Charity for teaching cases. Now, the money isn't coming and many of the medical jobs have been cut back.

Naturally, Blanco denies all. Gee... who should I believe - the General or the mouth-breathing Democrat politician? Speaking of, maybe Nagin shouldn't have dressed up (mockingly) like Gen. Honore on the Mardi Gras after Katrina, huh?

Keep in mind that Blanco was being advised by bubba and she refused to allow President Bush to call for an evacuation for three days before the hurricane hit.

They thought they would clean up on FEMA dollars.

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