Jindal: 'End This Culture of Dependence'

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal vowed to “end this culture of dependence” by opting out of ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion.

“We’ve rejected all the grants,” Jindal told Greta van Susteren on Fox last night. “We know from other states’ experiences it could easily run in the tens of millions of dollars. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The reality is, the Medicaid expansion — we’ve calculated — our health department calculated the first 10 years of implementation would cost our taxpayers over $3 billion.”

“We’ve seen promise after promise broken by this president when it comes to health care. My real concerns — not the costs of actually running the exchanges, but what it does to premiums, what it does to employers in Louisiana, what it does to our taxpayers,” he added.

Jindal said his state has already had harsh experiences with state-run healthcare and residents are being transitioned from Medicaid to privately run insurance programs.

“The government’s already spending 24 percent of the GDP. You know, we’ve got a choice. Do we go the way of Europe?” the governor said. “You know, our founding fathers were celebrating, they were declaring our independence. I don’t think they intended us to be this dependent on government-run programs.”