• By MICHELLE MILLHOLLON & MARSHA SHULER
• Advocate Capitol News Bureau
• Published: Oct 10, 2007 - Page: 1A

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U.S. Rep. Bobby Jindal launched his political career by bringing Louisiana’s runaway Medicaid budget under control before he was 26.

But Jindal’s health-care cuts in the mid-1990s haunt his efforts to become governor.

Voters in the Oct. 20 primary election are being presented with two very different views of the Republican congressman.

State Sen. Walter Boasso, D-Arabi, contends the Rhodes scholar made budget cuts at the state Department of Health and Hospitals that show he has a big brain but little heart. Boasso aired a commercial that blames Jindal’s Medicaid cuts for the eviction of a mentally disabled man from a New Orleans nursing home.

Jindal, R-Kenner, responded to the criticism with a commercial featuring a Richland Parish physician who praises him for rescuing a Medicaid program teetering on the brink of collapse from corruption.

Jindal reined in a runaway Medicaid budget and landed a position on Capitol Hill. But it casts a shadow over him as a campaign issue.

He contends he cut Medicaid spending by $300 a person without sacrificing care.

His political opponents say that is not possible.

Lois Simpson, executive director for The Advocacy Center in New Orleans, said the budget cuts affected people and included “ridiculous” proposals, such as severely limiting Medicaid patients’ prescriptions.

“Thinking back it seems like there were a lot of across-the-board kind of cuts instead of looking at individual needs. It’s very wonkish,” Simpson said.

Dr. John Cooksey, a Monroe ophthalmologist and a former congressman, said Jindal helped the elderly and others by restoring a state Medicaid program that was practically bankrupt.

“He provided leadership to get Medicaid back on an even footing. Had it been left the way it was, a lot of people would have been let out of nursing homes,” he said.

Budget problems
Jindal was 24 in 1996 when Gov. Mike Foster appointed him to be secretary of the state Department of Health and Hospitals. He served two years before taking a $110,000-a-year job in early 1998 as executive director of the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare.