Leadership Quote by Kathleen Blanco

“Let me be clear” is the politician’s flare gun: a promise of plain speech that also signals a fight is underway. Blanco’s line reads like a preemptive strike against the standard critique of “choice” rhetoric in health care - that it’s a code word for privatization, cost cutting, or quietly shifting risk onto families least able to absorb it. By naming “the elderly and persons with disabilities” first, she tries to inoculate the argument against charges of cruelty. Choice, she insists, isn’t just for the mobile, insured, or affluent; it must extend to people whose options are typically administered by the state.

The subtext is a tug-of-war over who controls care: institutions, state agencies, private providers, or the individual. Blanco frames the state not as an impersonal bureaucracy but as an obligated caretaker, then widens the moral circle to “their families,” acknowledging the hidden labor that props up public systems. That addition matters: it subtly rebukes policies that treat caregiving as an invisible, endless family resource.

Contextually, this is the language of a governor navigating reforms in Medicaid, long-term care, or disability services, where “choice” can mean home- and community-based care rather than nursing facilities, or the ability to pick providers within managed-care arrangements. The sentence’s careful stacking of constituencies is not just inclusion; it’s coalition-building. Blanco is trying to make a market-flavored word (“choice”) carry a civic-duty payload: the state can modernize care without abandoning the people most dependent on it.