Our tax dollars and insurance dollars are going to support unnecessary procedures and such and the public doesn’t have any incentive to choose carefully. Reigning in tax dollars will just result in fewer people with insurance and more expensive emergency care (unless we can live with lots of folks dying in the street). We have to find a way to incentivize people getting the right care (as Newt essentially alludes to). Yet the addiction of businesses of many kinds to the public largess is such that there is tremendous resistance to any solution.

Re. primary care/family medicine, the problem is that only 2% of US graduates are going into gen med, peds, or fam med. These primary care specialties were very popular in the 1990′s, but as specialist salaries, driven by procedure-based reimbursement, have risen to as much as 7x that for primary care for many specialties, and while expectations for primary care management of complex patients have risen, students see primary care as undesirable. This despite the evidence that more primary care at national levels (comparing nations), US state levels, and US county levels produces higher quality for less cost.

I’m interested in perspectives from the conservative end of things to these issues. Seems to me, we need all the thinking we can get.

I seem to recall one major player named Nancy P. who had to race out and visit the Pope as she “fast tracked” another piece of the president’s agenda. That should never trump reading what you sign, especially as you are creating a burden for generations to come including some babies yet to be born.

As to Newt’s personal handling of his wife’s death. While you can surely express your opinion, that input derails this vital debate. As such while I shall not defend his action, I have no intention of commenting further.

As Martin Luther King asserted:
Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

We are being oppressed by the political class, corporations, and their lobbyists. Yesterday, Roger Hedgecock shared the lobbyists motto: If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.

I don’t care if it is the “right” or the “left” who is in power at the time – the vast majority of us are pawns (less than pawns) in this game. Our elected representatives are unresponsive to our needs and/or demands.

Power – though recognized in our Constitution to be possessed by us, the citizens – is not really being shared with us. We as a people have grown complacent. A complacent populace is clay in the hands of dictators.

Look at the current situation. Individuals are standing up, rising up, and speaking out at Tea Parties and Town Hall meetings. They are being roundly criticized and ridiculed, by people at the highest levels of the Barack Obama administration. This man was elected and is supposed to be the president of “all Americans.”

He is at least complicit, at worst, an advocate of the attacks on the character and motivations of those freely exercising their rights, not just as Americans, but in accordance with the wording of our Constitution, God-given, inalienable rights. In United Nations jargon, that would be HUMAN RIGHTS.

(Of course, the United States’ Constitution is sufficient for me. I don’t need the UN to try to supersede God in determining the terminology used to describe what each of us knows in her or his heart.)

This whole health care debate is about POWER.

We cede our power when the politicians say “Trust me.”

As the crowd clamored at Claire McCaskill’s Town Hall,
“We don’t trust you!”

That’s where this movement is starting. And that is precisely why we the people are being attacked.

It’s not lost on me that after his “slap down” in 1998 he left office shortly thereafter, and targeted healthcare as the cause of the future. Only he simply collected millions of dollars insted of doing anything about it.

Newton is an interesting study, just like Bill Clinton and Barrack Oboma he was abandoned by his father, then 19 and left with a sixteen year old Mother. He decries the very services that gave him a chance in life. That is a fighting quality.

As for healthcare, he and his GOP brethren could use some schooling on how th American System works. I am stunned and embarrassed that a former speaker of the house does not understand the process of a bill becoming law. Of course he does, he is just a LIAR and A CHEATER, and AN ASSHOLE FOR LEAVING HIS DYING wife. But that being said, let’s look at this:

http://www.schoolhouserock.tv/Bill.html

For this is how a bill becomes a law. and there is no BILL YET.

These are the population the government wants, not the working,self reliant,self sustaining. They make Govenement smaller, not bigger!

Taking from the self reliant and giving to the needy!

Watch as the needy grows like a weed, if this Health Care Reform passes, ya just need to look at Santa Ana!!

stop state restriction’s on health insurance companies within their states!

Thats it, “Competition”, is the key!.