Louisiana Republican gubernatorial candidate Bobby Jindal of Baton Rouge (right) thanks 12-year-old Kayla Breaux, a mentally disabled child, for attending his news conference Monday on the steps of New Orleans Charity Hospital in New Orleans. (AP Photo/Ted Jackson)

The Associated Press

BATON ROUGE - For months, the thrust of the health-care plan pitched by gubernatorial candidate Kathleen Blanco of Lafayette has been to assemble "the best and brightest minds" to a summit to work on reversing Louisiana's dismal health-care indicators.

Now the Democratic candidate is touting expanded health-care goals, muscling in on the territory of her Republican rival Bobby Jindal of Baton Rouge, who once ran the state health department and often is credited with reining in a bloated health-care budget and cracking down on fraud.

Blanco has targeted Jindal's record, portraying the GOP candidate in the Nov. 15 runoff as a career bureaucrat who worried only about the budget numbers instead of the people behind them. "We're talking about people, not statistics."

Jindal said Blanco is smearing his accomplishments at the state Department of Health and Hospitals. "For six, seven, eight years, my health-care record has been praised, it's been studied, it's been analyzed and it's a shame that only in the last two or three weeks of a very close election, my opponent would try to distort my record," he said in a news release Tuesday.

Blanco has begun rattling off health-care numbers - one-fifth of Louisianans have no health insurance and 1 in 8 children is uninsured - in a manner that seems to take a page right out of Jindal's campaign handbook. "We are in the top five uninsured states in the nation. This is a statistic that has to change," she said.

At a campaign stop Tuesday on the steps of the state Capitol in Baton Rouge, Blanco pledged to expand the LaCHIP program that provides health coverage for children, raise the income level for people to be eligible for Medicaid, maintain the state's charity hospitals and focus on less costly preventive and primary care.

Blanco, the state's lieutenant governor, did not provide details on the costs of the expansions or how the state would pay for them. She said the state should change the way it spends its money, saving dollars on expensive emergency room care by treating conditions early on when they are less severe.

"We're going to take apart the whole system. If you stop it on the front end, you save money on the back end."

Some of her health-care ideas mirror those of Jindal, like pledges to continue stressing preventive and primary care to reduce health-care spending and to work with insurance companies and employers to get the working poor insured.

"There's a lot of ideas that she has in her platform that are a part of Bobby's platform that we put out back in August," said Jindal spokesman Trey Williams.

When questioned about the specifics of how she would expand Medicaid eligibility, Blanco said that's an item that would have to be addressed in the health-care summit, which she said would be co-chaired by U.S. Sen. John Breaux, who endorsed her campaign for governor. She said the income eligible for Medicaid coverage would be raised "very slightly."

Blanco talked about starting programs that forgive student loans and offer low-interest home loans to health-care workers to address shortages in the work force. She supported joining other states in a bulk purchase program to save money on prescription drugs.