Leadership Quote by Bobby Jindal

Jindal’s line is engineered to do two things at once: sound technocratic and stoke indignation. He opens with the language of spreadsheets - “comparing Medicare’s growth rates” to “private insurance” and “other Federal programs” - a bid for credibility that implies he’s doing the hard math, not mere ideology. But the sentence quickly pivots from analysis to spectacle. The escalation from “millions” to “billions” isn’t new information so much as a moral drumbeat: the number is meant to feel obscene, not merely large.

The key subtext is that Medicare can be judged like a business unit. By benchmarking it against private insurance, he smuggles in a market standard of “efficiency” and suggests that government is uniquely prone to bloat. The phrase “we run” is also doing quiet work: it invokes a managerial “we” that includes the audience as shareholders in a mismanaged enterprise, even as it sets up a blame target - the federal apparatus - without naming specific contractors, providers, or political decisions that often drive costs.

Contextually, this fits the post-2008 Republican reform script: don’t attack Medicare as a promise outright; attack its “growth rates” and “waste.” “Waste” is the safest criticism in American politics because it doesn’t require a tradeoff. Nobody is for waste, which means the listener can agree before hearing what cuts or structural changes are actually being proposed. The sentence’s breathless accumulation mirrors its strategy: overwhelm the ear with comparisons, then land on a single emotional conclusion - something big is being stolen, and someone needs to be brought in to stop it.