A federal arbitration panel ruled that Louisiana would receive $474.8 million to pay for the replacement of Charity Hospital in New Orleans, which has been closed since Hurricane Katrina. The ruling gives a major boost to plans to replace Charity, a state-owned hospital for the indigent, with a new $1.2 billion academic medical center, the New York Times reports. State officials and the Federal Emergency Management Agency had been locked in a dispute for more than four years about whether Charity was so damaged that it had to be replaced, and how much the federal government would owe.
