Troll plan

Career bureaucrat Bobby Jindal proposes a health care "plan" that he says will protect you from "Washington bureaucrats"

I won’t endorse a plan that sees millions of other Americans forced out of the insurance they like, simply because it doesn’t meet some Washington bureaucrat’s standards. And I won’t endorse a plan that sees Americans extended the promise of insurance, only to find out that the “coverage” provided doesn’t guarantee they’ll receive the care they need.

He purports to accomplish this through block grants to the states so that they can "come up with insurance reforms and other solutions" which would probably be done in consultation with some industry bureaucrats.

Mostly, though, it's the same menu of crap policies conservatives have been pushing for decades; limits on malpractice suits, replacing Medicare with a voucher system, health savings accounts, etc.

In other words, it's a political ploy by an increasingly desperate Jindal sensing that he's being ignored by the media and the circle of Repbublican donors making decisions about who they're going to back for President.

Beyond developing a health-care plan, Jindal has been meeting with dozens of Republicans who served as influential bundlers for the campaign of Mitt Romney, the 2012 GOP presidential nominee. Prominent donors also know Jindal from his time as chairman of the Republican Governors Association. Nevertheless, few have said they would back him.

 Oh and, just for fun, these proposals are a complete waste of time too.

Jindal's proposal would be lucky to get much Republican -- let alone Democratic -- support. First, as conservative health policy experts James Capretta and Tom Miller estimate, high-risk pools aimed at covering up to 4 million people would cost between $150 to $200 billion over 10 years. So Jindal's figure is already low (although his policy director surmised that states could come up with the rest of the money). Second, the Republican-led House hasn't shown any willingness to fund high-risk pools. In fact, last year GOP lawmakers scuttled a bill pushed by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) to spend just $3.6 billion on high risk pools for under a year, fully paid for with cuts to Obamacare.

Conservative policy analysts don't even take it seriously and Republican lawmakers are unlikely to support it anyway.  Jindal probably got the little attention bump he was looking for this week, but it may not be the kind of attention he was looking for.

"It is too disruptive to existing employer-provided insurance, and it does not help enough people get coverage," wrote Ramesh Ponnuru, a senior editor at the conservative National Review. "Replacing Obamacare with this plan would probably result in millions of people losing their coverage, and I think that would doom it."

Or maybe there's no such thing as bad attention.