Newt's Full of Ideas

Newt Gingrich is not announced as a candidate for the presidency, but he’s certainly busy doing what he does best—churning out political ideas.

First of all, he’s issued a 21st Century Contract With America, a ten point program like the old 1994 Contract.  As Newt writes: 

In a rapidly changing world with new threats and new competitors, we must implement policies that will ensure America’s leadership, safety, and prosperity. And we must reinvigorate the core values that have made an exceptional civilization.

A quick scan of the ten articles in the Contract show that Newt’s got his heart and his mind in the right place.  It is every conservative’s dream agenda and it even has a nod for the ageing baby boom generation with a proposal for facilitating active retirement.

But Newt is also ready with ideas for improving health care.  He’s proposing a 21st Century Intelligent Health System.  First of all, he writes, let’s go paperless. Yes, but wouldn’t that be kind of expensive?  Actually, no. For you doubters out there, Newt has a suggestion.

I will urge you to contact the North Fulton Family Clinic [in Alpharetta, Ga.], which in 1998 went paperless with a workflow-organized ambulatory electronic health record.
And in the first year, to their shock, they discovered that they were saving $33 per patient visit. Not costing ! saving.

And then, of course, we are all going to go wireless.

But we have to be careful.  We want the federal government to help get this intelligent system off the ground but not dictate its exact form.  That would freeze it in place and stop further development, because, he writes,

whatever standards we set this year will be wrong five years from now, because the technology is going to keep evolving dramatically.

A big challenge for the future is to train people to look after their own health care. Already, in diabetes, the patient is essential in long-term well-being.

If we find out as soon as you become diabetic and learn how to teach you to be able to take care of yourself so that you don’t end up in the emergency room, you don’t end up hospitalized, you don’t end up losing your limbs or going blind or losing your kidneys and needing dialysis or having heart disease.

Doctors can’t do it.  When you get to the emergency room, it is already too late.

Nobody knows what will happen in the presidential race.  But New Gingrich is ready, as always, with ideas.  Lots of them.