Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) made a bold claim about his opposition to Obamacare and other declared and likely 2016 Republican presidential candidates.
“I spent the last year and a half putting together details policies on energy, healthcare, education, foreign policy. I’m the only potential candidate with a detailed plan to repeal and replace Obamacare,” Jindal said in an interview with CNN on Thursday.
Jindal’s comments come as he hints at a 2016 White House bid. He recently created a presidential exploratory committee and said during the CNN interview that he would publicly announce his decision after the Louisiana legislative session ends on June 11.
Every Republican running for president or toying with the idea has expressed strong opposition to Obamacare and called for repealing it.
In April 2014, Jindal circulated an outline of his plan to repeal Obamacare and replace it with a set of ideas popular among conservatives such as health savings accounts, privatizing parts of Medicare, handing over Medicaid to the states, and health care tax breaks. As TPM previously noted though, the plan was notably vague and even conservative journalists voiced problems with parts of it.
“It is too disruptive to existing employer-provided insurance, and it does not help enough people get coverage,” National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru wrote of Jinda’s proposal to bring back a standard deduction for employer provided healthcare and health insurance bought individually. “Replacing Obamacare with this plan would probably result in millions of people losing their coverage, and I think that would doom it.”