Coming This Summer: Health Care WarsThis Time It's Personal

by Newt Gingrich

The Washington battle that will most directly and profoundly affect you and your families' lives is the battle for the future of our health care system, which will play out this summer.On one side are forces advocating a big government, big regulation approach that will transform the private health system into a government-dominated bureaucracy.

On the other side is a new plan that gives individual Americans control over their health care, and provides the affordability and choice that makes that control meaningful.Both sides share the goals of providing health insurance to all Americans and reining in health care costs. The difference is how each plan would get there. One by government controlling - and ultimately rationing - your care. The other by you controlling and making informed decisions about you and your families' most precious possession: Your health.

A Transformative Proposal for Health Care: The Patients Choice Act

While the nation waits to see the plan President Obama will put forward, last week Senators Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Richard Burr (R-N.C.), and Representatives Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) introduced The Patients' Choice Act of 2009. They should be applauded for their leadership. The Patients' Choice Act is a serious, transformative proposal that, if enacted, would dramatically improve our health care system and the health of individual Americans. Unlike government-centered plans that empower bureaucracies, The Patients' Choice Act empowers individuals.

Empowering Individuals Instead of Bureaucracies

The Patients' Choice Act takes on the toughest challenges we face: improving individual health and managing chronic disease; delivering the best quality care; expanding affordable coverage to every American; and putting Medicare and Medicaid on solid, sustainable ground. And every idea starts in exactly the right place: with the individual. Individuals should be empowered and encouraged to decide for themselves what is best for them. From choosing what doctor to see to what insurance to buy to what course of treatment to take, only an individual-centered health care system will bring about the real change we need. According to its sponsors, the main goals of The Patients' Choice Act are these:

Emphasize Prevention: Focusing on prevention not only leads to better health but lowers long term costs.

Create a Market that Works for Patients: The Patients' Choice Act gives insurance companies incentives to cover chronically sick patients, provides businesses transparent rules, and gives patients convenient and affordable options.

Guarantee a Choice of Coverage Options: Patients can choose from a variety of private insurance plans.

Insist on Fairness for Every Patient.

Fairly Compensate Patient Injuries: The bill creates a legal system that serves the interests of the injured, not the interests of trial attorneys.

No Tax Increases or New Government Spending: For each American, our country already spends almost twice as much as other industrialized countries spend on health care. It's time we got something better for our money.

Restore Accountability to Government Programs: Our children and grandchildren will face future tax increases to pay for the $36 trillion in unfunded liabilities in the Medicare program alone unless something changes. And, according to some estimates, fraud and waste account for 10 percent of all health care spending. That's approximately $100 billion each year.

Include Ideas for Governors and States: Washington has proven time and again that a one-size-fits-all mandate won't work. True health reform must include governors, states, and every American citizen.

It's Time to Move From Ideas and Options to Real Solutions

The Patients' Choice Act complements the thoughtful work done so far by Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mont.), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and Sen. Chuck Grassley, the ranking Republican member. They have published three detailed papers exploring what reform options are being considered in three major areas: improving the delivery of care, expanding coverage, and paying for reform. They've invited public comment throughout the process and worked with industry representatives, in public hearings and in private meetings.

The introduction of this transformative legislation is proof that it's time to move from options to real solutions. The Center for Health Transformation (CHT), which I helped found, is working with both sides of this debate to encourage legislation that encompasses a number of policy proposals that are necessary to transform our health system. Our proposals span the entire health care spectrum from improving individual health, converting to an electronic health system, combating fraud and waste in our Medicare and Medicaid programs, and expanding coverage to every American.

10 Essential Principles of Health Care ReformCHT has developed the following 10 principles which we believe must be included in any major health reform bill:

• Every American should be encouraged and incentivized to take personal responsibility for his or her health.
• Every American should have genuine access to quality, cost-effective care that best meets his or her individual needs.
• Every American should have health insurance coverage (private or public) that is affordable, accessible, and portable-no matter where he or she chooses to work or live.
• Health care providers should deliver the best possible care based upon best evidence or best practice.
• Every provider of care, from doctors and nurses to pharmacists and hospitals, should be interconnected with an electronic health record for every American.
• Payment to providers should be based on the quality of care delivered, not the number of transactions or services provided.
• Cost, quality, and performance information should be available and accessible to all consumers.
• Government should promote and encourage competitive, market-based solutions in the private sector.
• Government should offer effective, efficient, and sustainable public programs for those who need them.
• Government should aggressively invest in targeted clinical research, laying the foundations for future breakthroughs and cures.

You can read our entire plan here along with a checklist for you to grade any proposals your representatives put forth. The problems we face in health care know no political party, and neither do all the solutions. As the debates begin in earnest over how to actually solve these problems, everyone should be encouraged to offer ideas. We are at our best when we work collaboratively to put forth bold, transformative solutions.

Newt Gingrich

(Shared with permission)

Newt Gingrich: Bankruptcy, Not Bailout

"Outrage" is the word on everyone's lips to describe the fat bonuses being paid with taxpayer funds to the failed executives at AIG - and it is an outrage.

It's an outrage that the American people are being asked to pay for the bad behavior of people who should have known better, be they reckless traders on Wall Street or reckless borrowers on Main Street.

But the cure for our outrage is not merely, as President Obama is demanding, that AIG be prevented from paying its executives. The $165 million in planned bonuses - as manifestly undeserved as it is - is chicken feed compared to the $170 billion in taxpayer funds AIG has received so far.

Nor is it acceptable to ask Americans to keep throwing their tax dollars at failed companies and their leaders.

The answer is an old fashioned one: AIG should choose between receivership or bankruptcy. It should not be allowed to choose more bailouts from the taxpayer.

Restore the Rule of Law: Allow Failing Corporations to go Bankrupt

Under U.S. law, Chapter 11 bankruptcy allows a company to reorganize. Chapter 7 allows a company to dissolve itself.

The choices for AIG, as both an insurance and non-insurance company, are more complicated, but ultimately boil down to the same options. And for other companies either receiving or looking to receive a bailout from the taxpayers, the option should instead be bankruptcy.

Bankruptcy would send a needed message to U.S. investors: Don't assume the government will bail you out when you do something stupid.

And most importantly, bankruptcy would replace the rule of politicians over U.S. financial institutions with the rule of law.

Geithner Didn't Inherit the Policy of Throwing Billions at Failing Companies - He Helped Create It

Because when it comes to Washington's handling of the financial crisis, so far we've had the rule of politicians, not the rule of law. Most prominent among the politicians in question is Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner.

As Americans' level of outraged has risen, so has the level of finger pointing by Geithner and others for the mess we're in.But Treasury Secretary Geithner is disingenuous at best and untruthful at worst when he says that he "inherited the worst fiscal situation in American history."

The truth is that Secretary Geithner didn't inherit the policy of throwing billions of taxpayer dollars at failing companies - he helped create it.

Even before he was Treasury Secretary - when he was still head of the New York Federal Reserve - Geithner was so deeply involved in the government's bail out of Bear Stearns, its take over of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and its bailout of AIG that this was the Washington Post's headline from September 19, 2008:"In the Crucible of Crisis, Paulson, Bernanke and Geithner Forge a Committee of Three".

The first meeting of the first bailout - of Bear Stearns - was held in Geithner's office. And the first meeting of what has become a $170 billion bailout of AIG was held - where else? In Geithner's New York Fed office.

Why Not Bankruptcy for AIG? Because Wall Street Wouldn't Have Done As Well

From the outset, Geithner was central to the developing policy of having the taxpayers bail out ailing financial institutions like AIG rather then allow them to go bankrupt. And for months now, we've been told that these bailouts were necessary to avoid a wider, cataclysmic, financial meltdown.

But now it's clear that other, less noble, considerations were at play.

As the Wall Street Journal editorialized yesterday, the real outrage over the AIG bailout isn't executive bonuses, it's that billions in taxpayer funds intended for AIG have been passed through to benefit foreign banks and Wall Street behemoths like Goldman Sachs.

And as former AIG CEO Hank Greenburg testified last October, these financial institutions wouldn't have faired as well if AIG had filed for bankruptcy protection rather than do what it did, which was to negotiate a bailout with Timothy Geithner's New York Federal Reserve. Here's how Greenburg put it:"Although AIG stockholders could have fared better if the company had filed for bankruptcy protection, other stakeholders - like AIG's Wall Street counterparties in swaps and other transactions - would have fared worse."

For the Cost of Bailing Out AIG, Every American Household Could Have Free Electricity For a Year

So now everyone is outraged, and rightly so. But the lavish executive bonuses being paid with taxpayer funds are just the beginning of the story.

So far, the American taxpayers are on the hook for $170 billion to AIG - that's an astounding $1,224 per taxpayer.

What else could we have done with all this money?

$170 billion would pay for more than doubling the Navy's fleet of aircraft carriers.
$170 billion would pay for a four-year education at a public university for more then two million Americans.
$170 billion would cover the electricity bill of every household in America for an entire year.

When You Reward Failure, All You Get is More Failure

What Washington should learn from all this outrage is to return to the common sense that should have guided it all along: When you reward failure, all you get it more failure.

A company that needs a $170 billion taxpayer bailout is a failed company. The executives that led that company are failed executives. But instead of having to face the consequences of their failure responsibly through bankruptcy or receivership, AIG and its Wall Street "counterparties" are being rewarded for their recklessness - with our money.

Thanks to the Bush-Obama-Geithner policy of bailing out failing companies, we now have the worst of all possible scenarios: A taxpayer subsidized, government supervised private company; an unsustainable public/private hybrid that is too public to make its own decisions and too private to be responsible to the taxpayers that are keeping it alive.

Outrages like the fat cat bonuses currently dominating the headlines will only continue as long as the rule of politicians supplants the rule of law on Wall Street.Congress should rethink this entire process. The dangers of a domino-like financial meltdown are real. But so, too, is the danger that the outrage of the American people will reach the point that we no longer trust the dire warnings - or the righteous indignation - coming from Washington.

(Reprinted with permission)

Fairness?

A number of people have sent me the article below today regarding Nancy Pelosi's attempts to ensure there is no balance in the House. I'll let you read the article to get the full details, but it's another scary happening in the works that has me wondering even more about the future of our country.

I listened recently to Rep. Steny Hoyer answering questions on a talk show. One of the questions dealt with the Union bill which will do away with secret ballots (Employee Free Choice Act). He's all for it and expects it to come up --- and pass --- this year. If you're unfamiliar, it's a bill that will basically take away an employees right to vote for or against a Union in private. Talk about intimidation, not to mention basic rights. Try to imagine how fast Unions are going to take over business after business.

Then there is the so-called "Fairness Doctrine". That one is on the horizon also. In broad strokes, it will force equal time for views from both sides of the political spectrum. On the radio. Ya know, the area that conservatives dominate at the moment...

I'd be against this Bill even if it did extend to mainstream media news, television and theater. Can you imagine a world where in every show if someone said "global warming" the other guys would have equal time to disprove it? Nah, me either. No way the Dems are going to allow that to happen! However, if this bill passes, and it probably will given the make-up of Congress, it's going to be a nasty mess. I'll have to write another blog on what I think will happen if the Fairness Doctrine becomes law some day.

I wonder how long it will be after the Fairness Doctrine passes before this cancerous trend starts worming its way into other arenas? How long before freedom of speech and freedom of the press are history?

I'd like to think we won't get that far, but when ideology trumps common sense and power gives temporary invincibility, anything can happen.

I hope all my readers will go do a bit of research on the three issues I've mentioned: the rule changes being proposed by Pelosi (below), the new Union bill (ironically called the Employee Free Choice Act) and the Fairness Doctrine. Nothing fair 'bout any of 'em.

Pelosi Erases Gingrich's Long-Standing Fairness Rules
by Connie Hair
01/05/2009
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans to re-write House rules today to ensure that the Republican minority is unable to have any influence on legislation. Pelosi’s proposals are so draconian, and will so polarize the Capitol, that any thought President-elect Obama has of bipartisan cooperation will be rendered impossible before he even takes office.
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=30143#continueA