Bobby Jindal’s healthcare scam
Short version:
Step 1: Make cuts as head of DHH, saving money in the short term but hurting the system in the long term.
Step 2: Leave office before the long term effects take place, have others claim you saved the system fiscally.
Step 3: Watch as the failures take place, even though your cuts helped the failures.
Step 4: Ride in on your white horse and claim to be able to “save the day” by “fixing” the mess that exists in the system (even though you created many of them). Have others back you up
Long Version:
Step 1: When Bobby Jindal served as head of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals (DHH), he made several decisions that on paper seemed to save Louisiana money (at least in the short term). However these cuts actually hurt people, including people who need mental health services from the state. You can read what others had to say on Jindal’s cuts. They include:
“This is a terrible situation for the mentally ill and their Families. The state is not only effectively denying patients critical medications, but inviting more serious and expensive problems that could be avoided.”
and
““Despite the fact that this state has had budget surpluses in a number of recent years, mental health funding has been cut, cut, cut. … It appears to those who cannot speak up for themselves because of the difficulty, stress and pain of schizophrenia, severe depression, manic-depression (bipolar illness) and other very serious brain disorders are being treated like the dog who is still being beaten even though he has already expired.”
There are also other people who lost access to health services (closed clinics being another huge problem). However, at the moment we will deal with mental health services.
Step 2: This is pretty simple. After 2 years, Jindal left for other employment, and since then he was applauded for turning a deficit into a surplus by effectively selling the fiscal story in a vacuum.
Step 3: This is pretty simple as well. We have all seen the healthcare problems in Louisiana even before Katrina.
Step 4: Newt promoted Bobby Jindal’s “plan” to fix Louisiana’s health care, showing the current flaws that existed in Louisiana’s healthcare system. Jindal is still promoted as the savior of the healthcare system for his cuts, of course those claims in the jindal website contain so much spin it makes me dizzy. You can see why the claims of Jindal apologists on his supposed record are wrong here. He is also applauded for his current attention to mental health needs (I guess they forgot about his cuts in the first place). And now, he rides in on his high horse, promoting what? That’s right, he is promoting an increase in funding for mental health patients.
It must be nice to manufacture a problem, not get blamed for it, and then get applauded for trying to solve it. This is the Jindal scam.
Note: To all the Jindal apologists. I am not saying that I am against doing what needs to be done to help mental health patients. I am saying that Jindal should not be applauded as a hero just because he is fixing a problem that he helped to create.
March 27th, 2008 at 9:01 am
I thought you were a Ron Paul supporter?
Well cuts often have the effect of improving as often budgets are bloated anyways, and of coarse we can depend on the dems to try and find a cloud to silver lining.
March 27th, 2008 at 9:45 am
Where did you get that I am a Ron Paul supporter?
Cuts may improve, but Jindal’s cuts did not. And now he is fixing the mess that he helped to create and will be applauded as some sort of hero for it.
It is disgusting.