Bobby Jindal’s privatized hospital gamble seems to have paid off.

This is an example of something that we call ‘competence.’

Louisiana spent $52 million less than was budgeted for Gov. Bobby Jindal’s privatization deals for the LSU hospitals that provide care to the uninsured in the recently ended fiscal year, according to data provided by the state health department.

Jindal’s health secretary, Kathy Kliebert, said the hospital’s new managers are improving care while also running more efficient operations.

“We feel really comfortable that they are managing their budgets, that their new cost structures that they’re setting in place are working, and at the same time we’re getting really good quality care,” Kliebert said in an interview.

I mention it because, after five and a half years of the current administration, people might have difficulty remembering what that sort of thing looks like. God knows that nobody working for Barack Obama these days would recognize competence if it owed them money – but I digress.  More from the Hayride, including the detail that Bobby Jindal took a little bit of a gamble, here: and one that paid off.

…if you’ve paid casual attention to the Charity privatization, you might be at a loss to summon up memories of dead bodies due to neglect as a result of the privatization. If there are oodles of corpses littering the roadsides outside of hospitals throughout Louisiana for lack of admittance, they’ve gone strangely unreported. And one would expect that’s not a story – Jindal closes government hospitals, pawns them off on greedy corporations, patients suffer and perish – Louisiana’s media would ignore.

There is no story. Nobody suffered from the leases of those hospitals. And the state is going to save a lot of money as a result, while likely delivering better services to the public.

We call that sort of thing ‘moral courage,’ by the way. Which is something else that’s utterly alien to the current administration.