Newts Full Of Ideas - Road to the Middle Class

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.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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