Posted on 08/19/2003 9:43:09 AM PDT by yoe
Capitol Hill (CNSNews.com)
- Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's eyes sparkled Monday as he stood in the U.S. Capitol holding the three books that contain the 2,054 pages of nationwide rules and regulations for Medicare in one hand and the 64-page pamphlet that encompasses all of the rules for the Federal Employee Health Benefit (FEHB) plan in the other.
"This is the FEHB plan, which gives you, I think, 85 choices around the country. This is Medicare," Gingrich said, comparing the two. "You don't have to be an Ayn Rand libertarian to say, almost automatically, this [FEHB] is smart, this [Medicare] is not smart."
But Gingrich's proposal, to the dismay of some fellow conservatives, is not to "privatize" Medicare or to "reform" the existing program.
"You can't actually reform the current health 'zone,'" said Gingrich, who argues that the current method of healthcare delivery under Medicare is too uncoordinated to be called a "system."
"This is not just a fancy use of language. We have lived through transformations, and they are profoundly different than reform," Gingrich told a room filled with mostly young, congressional staff members.
"Reform is when you think the current system's basically okay but, if I could tweak it a little bit, a few fixes, it would work fine," Gingrich said. "You're not just tweaking and fixing the 20th century system. You're, in fact, growing a brand new system."
As an example of "transformation," Gingrich asked the audience how many of them had used an Automated Teller Machine (ATM) to get cash outside the U.S. Approximately half of the group raised their hands. Two-thirds responded that they had not written a check for cash in more than six months. He then asked how many people got impatient waiting for the money to be dispensed by the ATM. About half the group raised their hands again.
"You're in a foreign country. You go to an anonymous machine that's available 24/7. You put in a piece of plastic. You punch in a four-number code. It reaches out 2,100 miles. It finds your bank, verifies who you are, validates that you have enough money and then gives you cash in the local currency, correctly translated at a slightly bad exchange rate," Gingrich explained. "It took us 11 seconds in Warsaw and 21 seconds in poor Switzerland...and people get impatient."
The architect of the 1994 Republican takeover of the House of Representatives then brought his transformation analogy back to the discussion of health care.
"I was in New Orleans talking to the Health Insurance Association of America, which are the people who pay the medical bills. There were 600 people in the room, and I asked them, 'How many of you get impatient [waiting for money from an ATM], and about 200 of them raised their hands," Gingrich recalled. "I said to them, 'Does this give you a hint why, culturally, taking 103 days to pay a medical bill isn't going to survive?' And they just stared at me."
Gingrich described established technology developments that allow doctors to use Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) with wireless communication capabilities to write and send prescriptions to pharmacies, bill insurance companies, schedule patient follow-up visits and even make appointments for patients with specialists. He compared that to one current healthcare "reform."
"In June [2003], the state of Florida adopted a bill, which said, 'A written prescription for a medicinal drug issued by a healthcare practitioner licensed by law to prescribe such drug must be legibly printed,'" Gingrich noted. "I just want to suggest to you, the idea in 2003, that we are trying to convince doctors to print legibly is not transformational."
Stability for seniors, more freedom with accountability for 'boomers'...............
Gingrich's proposed transformation of Medicare involves moving baby boomers to a system that, for example, gives patients more flexibility in where and how they can spend their healthcare dollars, but also makes them responsible for the money.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnsnews.com ...
Dude. That's why I made the comment about how smart the firmware would have to be to read doctor scribbles.
Get it? Could I be any more clear? Not how to modify handwriting glyphs to be machine-readable like the Palm....but how advanced code would have to be to read existing handwriting, ah because, so cliche, DOCTORS WRITE LIKE CRAP.
Or were you just looking for an oppty to tell us you sit next to someone important?
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