U.S. must reform it's health care system to stay competative in wrold market, per Newt Gingrich
31 10 08 - 12:09
Gingrich: Americans share responsibility for health care reform
By Lisa Rosetta - The Salt Lake Tribune
Unless America retools its health care system - and fast - it will lose its competitive edge in the world market.
That was the message Wednesday from former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, who warned a Salt Lake City audience that "just as we couldn't sustain Wall Street and we couldn't sustain housing, you cannot sustain consistently breaking the economic rules without paying a huge price."
Since leaving Congress in 1999, Gingrich has dedicated himself to cracking America's health care conundrum. He founded the Center for Health Transformation, which advocates preventive care-centered, market-based health reform that improves choice and quality, but also lowers costs.
"One of the great tragedies of [the Bush administration] is they had a real opportunity to provide real leadership on electronic health records, they had an opportunity to provide real leadership on moving toward health-based health reform," he told a reporters after his speech, given as part of Intermountain Healthcare's Healthy Dialogues speaker series.
The country would be dramatically further down the road of health reform if U.S. Health and Human Services secretaries Tommy G. Thompson and Mike Leavitt had not been "hamstrung by the White House in ways that make no sense to me," he said.
Gingrich said it is possible for Americans to live longer, healthier lives and have 100 percent health insurance coverage - but it requires changing more than just how the health care system is financed.
"If all you're talking about is how do I put enough money into the system nationwide, the correct answer is you can't," he said. "The current system is designed to expand to absorb the amount of money available, so the current system will be permanently underfunded."
Instead, Gingrich said, the country needs a "21st century personalized intelligent health system" with the goal of insuring every single American.
And that system starts with you. With personal responsibility as the starting point, Gingrich said, people will live longer, healthier lives at a lower cost.
Take diabetes, he said, the largest single cost driver of Medicare. The disease cannot be managed by a doctor or nurse alone; patients must take the initiative to both improve their diets and to exercise.
Gingrich - who acknowledged he needs to lose weight, too - said it's possible to have two national goals: exercise every day for 30 minutes, and for those who are packing extra weight, lose at least 10 pounds.
"I have a very simple model: you decide whether you want to spend the time exercising or spend the same amount of time in a hospital bed. Because you're going to do one or the other," he said.
Moving the country is this direction, however, will require some "meddling," Gingrich said. Schools should require K-12 physical education five days a week and revamp their school breakfast and lunch programs, making them more nutritious. Children who live within a mile of school should be required to walk and digital scales should become a feature of every classroom.
"What I'm suggesting," he said, "is you now have an opportunity to think about the total community and to think about individuals long before they become a patient."
Part of the reform effort, however, must also focus on creating a better health delivery system. Gingrich said technology must be better used to improve efficiency, such as adapting cell phones with cameras as a health tool. Best practices - both in medicine and management - should be adopted on a nationwide level, and reinforced by financially rewarding higher performing organizations.
"What if we were to take the worst hospitals and migrate them up to being comparable with the best? It would actually save us an enormous amount of pain, it would improve the health outcome of the patients, and it would save a lot of money," he said. "But today we have zero mechanisms for doing this. It's all random behavior."
Next January, Gingrich said, he'd like to see a series of congressional hearings: bring in the best of the best in health care and ask them to explain how they deliver better care at lower costs.
The federal government - the largest purchaser of health care in the country - should invest in moving health care in the right direction, Gingrich said. That includes wiping out fraud, which could result in $70 billion to $200 billion a year in savings.
America, Gingrich said, has had a long stretch of kidding itself and is just beginning its painful reality check.
"We're at the end of the long feast where we can be sloppy and stupid and it didn't matter because we were so big. We could get away with it," he said. "We're about to reenter the real world. Housing and Wall Street were the beginning. Health has to be an integral part of that and that means fairly large changes."