BATON ROUGE – With their national party committed to wasting Congress’ time and the taxpayers money on efforts to rip away health coverage from working Americans, and a state Republican leadership held captive by Gov. Bobby Jindal’s partisan agenda, GOP candidates for governor are struggling to defend their failures on healthcare. Due to the reckless financial mismanagement of Sen. David Vitter’s agents in the legislature, Louisiana taxpayers are being forced to leave money on the table at a time when our state’s economy is facing ruin. The partisan agenda that Vitter and his fellow Republicans are running on puts politics ahead of people, and turns away over $16 billion in federal funding over the next ten years.
Republican failures on healthcare have closed hospitals in Louisiana, and their cynical loyalty to out-of-state special interests stands to deny over 290,000 working Louisianans access to affordable healthcare. Despite their record of failure, GOP candidates for governor want to double down on the same ideas that have brought such misery to Louisiana. David Vitter supports Jindal’s disastrous hospital privatization scheme, while Scott Angelle opposes expanding healthcare access for our most vulnerable fellow citizens. Neither has offered a coherent plan for insuring those left behind by GOP failures.
“The failure of Republican healthcare policies in this state is impossible to ignore,” said Sen. Karen Carter Peterson, chairwoman of the Louisiana Democratic Party. “Louisiana families are looking for a candidate for governor that’s not defined by the failed GOP. None of the Republican candidates is offering a cure, just more of the same sickness that closed Baton Rouge General’s Mid City ER.”
###