Newt Gingrich Named #6 Most Influential Person in Healthcare

From Newt 2012:

Atlanta, GA -- Modern Healthcare has named Newt Gingrich #6 on their list of most influential people in healthcare. No other Republican presidential candidate is included in their list of 100.

“Newt Gingrich has spent more time and energy developing and popularizing free market healthcare solutions that would save lives and save money than all the other candidates combined” remarked Dr. Michael Burgess, Republican Congressman from the 26th district of Texas.

“As Republicans look for the right candidate to repeal and replace Obamacare, Modern Healthcare has reminded voters that Newt Gingrich’s status as an expert ant thought leader in health care policy is unmatched by any other candidate in the field,” added Burgess.

...

As a candidate, Newt is calling for the creation of a 21st-century Food and Drug Administration that shortens the time it takes private companies to deliver new cures and treatments to the patient. Gingrich cites the current FDA’s costly requirements as obstacles in gaining approval for new drugs and medical devices.

“Major reform at the FDA will help firms get products from the research laboratory to the marketplace faster,” Gingrich said. "The current FDA model takes too long, allows people to die in the interim, raises the costs so dramatically that small start-ups couldn't possibly bring new ideas to the table and is in effect driving jobs overseas."

Gingrich also points to electronic medical records as another way to improve health. "Faster access to information in real time allows doctors to make better decisions.”

Most notable, Gingrich wants to invest more in creating public-private partnerships to fund brain science and research with the goal of finding cures for costly diseases like Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. Gingrich notes that delaying the onset of Alzheimer's by just five years would save $10 trillion in public and private costs by 2050.

Read further about Newt Gingrich’s “Patient Power” plan to improve healthcare quality, lower costs, and insure every American without mandates at http://www.newt.org/solutions/healthcare.

Newt Gingrich Healthcare Record

In 2003, Newt founded the Center for Health Transformation to develop free market healthcare reforms to foster a 21st Century System of health and healthcare that is centered on the individual, prevention focused, knowledge intense and innovation rich. Newt also served as the Co-Chairman of the National Commission for Quality Long-term Care and the independent congressional Alzheimer’s Disease Study Group.

As Speaker of the House, Gingrich’s leadership helped save Medicare from bankruptcy, prompted FDA reform to help the seriously ill and initiated a new focus on research, prevention, and wellness. His contributions have been so great that the American Diabetes Association awarded him their highest non-medical award and the March of Dimes named him their 1995 Citizen of the Year.

January 19 newsletter: "1,968 Reasons to Repeal"

Newt's group Center for Health Transformation released a chart this week that shows "1,968 new and expanded powers given to Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius" [and my former governor -- how lucky am I?].

In his newsletter, Gingrich lists five of the most egregious powers given to the HHS:

• "The Secretary will decide what clinical drugs seniors can access."
• "The Secretary will instruct physicians and nurses exactly how to give a drug to their patients in long-term care facilities"
• "The Secretary will determine how dentists and dental hygienists should examine your teeth."
• "The Secretary can overrule states on what insurance rates can be whether they like it or not."
• "The Secretary can use comparative effectiveness research to determine access to care for seniors, like they do for patients in the British National Health Service." 

After writing that "the rush to socialism under the Obama administration puts all our freedoms at risk," Gingrich gives some explanation:

Of course, I am hardly the first to warn about the inherently totalitarian nature of big government.

Thomas Jefferson warned in a letter to Charles Hammond that 'When all government, domestic and foreign, in little as in great things, shall be drawn to Washington as the center of all power, it will render powerless the checks provided of one government on another and will become as venal and oppressive as the government from which we separated.'

Freidrich Hayek warned in the Road to Serfdom that 'The more the state ‘plans,’ the more difficult planning becomes for the individual.' Hayek also wrote in The Constitution of Liberty, 'Once wide coercive powers are given to governmental agencies for particular purposes, such powers cannot be effectively controlled by democratic assemblies.'

Even George Orwell, who was a left wing intellectual, understood the danger of giving too much power to unelected bureaucrats. Orwell’s novel, 1984, described dictatorship in London, not Moscow. He agreed with Hayek’s concerns in a review of the Road to Serfdom: 'It cannot be said too often…collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamed of.'

Gingrich again:

Flushed with the promise of these 1,968 new grants of authority to her office, Secretary Sebelius recently made a series of threats to use one of these new powers to punish health insurance companies who have dared to tell the truth about how the health reform law has led to rate hikes for their customers.

The idea of an unelected bureaucrat using her power to punish those who exercise their right to free speech should be considered abhorrent in a society that values liberty.

Also, as Karl Rove astutely pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, Secretary Sebelius has also used her new powers to reward her friends. The Secretary has granted a number of companies exemptions from key requirements in Obamacare. More than a third of these companies’ employees are unionized compared to a mere 7% of the national workforce....

No unelected bureaucrat should have this amount of power, whether he or she is in a Democratic or Republican administration.

The genius of the founding fathers is that they understood the fallen nature of man and designed a system of government to prevent any one person from being so powerful that he or she could violate the rights of any citizen.

Gingrich quotes Milton Friedman -- meaning Friedman, Hayek, and Jefferson in the same newsletter -- who said, "Where in the world do you find these angels that are going to reorganize society for us?”

Newt on Fox News, talks about NoMoreObamacare.com

Last night, Newt was interviewed by Greta Van Susteren about mainly the new website he set up to repeal Obamacare -- NoMoreObamacare.com -- and the GOP retreat this weekend, at which Gingrich will speak.

A portion:

[The House passing a repeal bill] is more than symbolic. Passing by a substantial margin the repeal of Obamacare is a very important first step. We have now over 100,000 signatures and they are growing every day. Our goal is to target the 23 Democratic senators who are up for election in 2012....

The Center for Health Transformation going to release tomorrow its third chart on Obamacare. This is a 50 square foot chart that lists the 1,969 grant of authority the Secretary of Health and Human Services in Obamacare. Thing about that, 1,969 grants of power over your health care to a single bureaucrat in Washington, D.C. I think combined with our earlier charts of 159 new offices under Obamacare and a 50 square foot chart of all the deadlines under Obamacare, those three charts are devastating examples of why we should repeal Obamacare.

10 Health Care Ideas

In a recent op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Newt Gingrich and John C. Goodman laid out ten health care ideas that so far have been ignored in the health care debate and which -- as opposed to most of the ideas pushed in Washington -- would go a long way to solving the problem of too few insured and high prices. Among the ideas proposed were making health insurance portable and electronic.

For years, Gingrich has been one of the few Republicans who could speak intelligently about health care. He has not been afraid to engage in discussions about the issue, also unlike many in his Party. He started the Center for Health Transformation in 2003 and has written many words about the issue.

Such a high-profile piece can only help to refute the claim from liberals that the Republicans only are screaming, "No!" to everything. They can keep sticking to that position, but in light of more writings like this and Paul Ryan's "A Roadmap for America's Future," it will only look ridiculous.