Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich Monday offered four rules for good government during the opening plenary of the 61st Annual Meeting of CSG's Southern Legislative Conference:
- Doing more of what you're already doing and expecting a different result is absolute insanity. Gingrich's first rule came from Albert Einstein.
- His second came from Dwight Eisenhower: Any time you can't solve a problem, make it bigger. "If you can make it big enouhg, you can see a glimmer of a way to solve it," Gingrich said.
- Real change requires real change. "Almost every problem we have today is self-inflicted," Gingrich said. He reminded theroom filled with Southern lawmakers and staff members that it took the U.S. less than four years from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to win victory in World War II, but it took 22 years to add a fifth runway to the Atlanta airport.
- Gingrich suggested lawmakers teach everyone around them to say "yes if" rather than "no because. The psychological difference, he said, can be felt in the energy of participants to the introduction of new ideas. For those who continue to respond negatively, Gingrich said to find replacements. "The greatest single problem of the Bush administration is they refuse to be serious about personnel," Gingrich said.
Gingrich's discussion on "Winning the Future" also touched on the two worlds in which we live -- the world that works and hte world that fails. He gave this example:
- FedEx and UPS can track a million moving packages hourly because of the investment in personnel and technology. But, he noted, the federal government can't track 20,000 people in the U.S. illegally when they're sitting still.
Gingrich offers potential solutions for transforming government, and also is developing a solutions lab to create a new dialogue about the country's problems, from education to energy to health care.
"You will never fix government until you distinguish between investment and costs," Gingrich said.
He offered three suggestions to revolutionize the health care system:
- Change systems so everyone has a health savings account or health reimbursment account;
- Adopt a right to know for the price of every procedure;
- Get six to 10 states to form a purchasing plan, and look to sites like Travelocity or Expedia to develop a comparison for all prescription drug costs. He predicts that could substantially reduce prescription drug prices.
"Change The System" - exactly. And it's easy to do with the right focus!
Posted by: HSAs | July 17, 2007 at 10:05 AM