By Rick Manning
Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has released a comprehensive health care reform plan that ends the Obamacare mess while ensuring protection for Americans with pre-existing conditions.
Obama’s victory celebration upon reaching seven million sign-ups for Obamacare by March 31st provides the perfect backdrop for Jindal’s comprehensive health care plan that dramatically increases competitive incentives for insurers, reforms medical malpractice laws, and restores patient health care choices.
While Obama is attempting to create a sense of acceptance of the current health care law using the seven million sign-ups as a signal that it is a fait accompli, opponents of the law would be remiss to back down. Counted among the formerly uninsured is a married California man and his wife who were without health insurance until he was forced to purchase it.
Now, to pay the $1000 a month premium with a $5000 per person deductible policy he was compelled to buy, his wife is raising rates on her home based business clients, and the family is making major cuts in an already threadbare budget. Somehow I don’t expect this family or others like them to vote for those responsible for keeping Obamacare intact.
Into this political environment, Governor Jindal offers a repeal of Obamacare, replacing it with the type of health care alternative that reforms many of the underlying problems that led to the Obamacare mistake in the first place.
Jindal’s plan makes this point clearly stating, “Repealing all of Obamacare is a good and necessary step—but not one sufficient by itself to achieve the real health reform America needs. The President was right about one thing: American health care did need reform. But Obamacare did not “reform” American health care, so much as it took a dysfunctional system and made it dramatically worse.”
The Jindal plan itself is built around three pillars designed to return control of the health care system back to doctors and patients: lowering health care costs both for individuals and for the government; protecting the most vulnerable Americans including those with pre-existing conditions and disabilities, and ensuring health insurance portability and choice.
Jindal, a health policy expert, takes this last point to heart asserting that existing law, “… may actually detract from efforts to protect those who need health care most. The law provides a more sizable federal match for states to expand their Medicaid programs to childless adults than it does for states to cover individuals with disabilities.”
He continues noting, “At a time when more than half a million Americans with disabilities are on state waiting lists waiting to qualify for long-term supports and services, it is both uncompassionate and unfair for the (Obama) Administration instead to focus on covering childless adults, most of whom are able to work or prepare for work.”
Republicans and free market advocates are often cast as being uncaring toward the needs of the least of these by those whose policies perpetuate poverty. Governor Bobby Jindal’s comprehensive health care plan answers this charge by protecting the most vulnerable among us while restoring the market principles that our previously vibrant health care system was built upon.
Rick Manning (@rmanning957 and rmanning@getliberty.org) is vice president of public policy and communications for Americans for Limited Government.
