Gingrich and Privatization

[many a good man]

Fellow DUers:

I'm looking for some thoughtful, useful information about the former Speaker. Not opinionated rants, but reasoned and honest information about his background and the policies he advocates.

My perception of him is that he is intellectually dishonest, personally immoral, and a shill for the big corporations. Unfortunately I'm having a hard time coming up with anything other than vague generalities.

I remember reading that he once taught history at a college somewhere and finding that his interpretations were wildly out of the mainstream. I've read the party memo he wrote concerning the use of language as a tool for political attack. I need more specifics.

I know he advocates privatization of many things that are currently run by the government. Please tell me some of the things he has advocated and show me some good balanced analyses showing how bad this is.

Please help me if you can. The reason I'm asking for this is because next week I'm meeting with someone of great influence who seems to be endorsing some of Newt's policy prescriptions . Your help will be greatly appreciated.

[La_Serpiente]

1. Here he is

on the issues

http://www.issues2000.org/Newt_Gingrich.htm

more on

futurist stuff

http://www.futures.hawaii.edu/dator/governance/Newt.html

transcript

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/newt/newtscript.html

http://www.opensecrets.org/navasp/whosgetting_response.asp

[many a good man]

2. Thanks, Serp

Amazingly these resources were pretty thin on such controversial figure. This snippet came from the Frontline piece:

PETER J. BOYER: GOPAC hatched another idea: "Professor Newt." He presided over an American history course transmitted nationwide by satellite. "The goal," Newt said, "is to create a shared doctrine for perhaps a quarter million citizen activists. The foundation of that doctrine was Gingrich's core belief that the very survival of American culture was in peril because the country had embraced the values of the Great Society.


I had to wade through a few pages of Google to find a pretty good statement of his overall philosopy. I found a good one here: http://holtz.org/Library/Social%20Science/The%20Age%20of%20Transitions%20by%20Newt%20Gingrich.htm

Here's an excerpt:

The next stage after balancing the budget and welfare reform is to set as a goal the dramatic modernization and privatization of government so that taxes could be capped at 25% (state, federal, and local combined) of an individual's income.
...

America today ranks behind a number of other countries in the successful privatization of government functions.
...


The argument that individual insurance is too expensive is simply technologically ignorant. Within a year or two the Internet will allow aggregated individual accounts without agents' commissions (unless state laws artificially block them). If Amazon can sell books then Internet health can sell individual policies at low costs.

The absurdity of the Health Care Financing Administration's 133,000 pages of regulations and the fact that HCFA continues a paper system when clearly every bill should be electronic (which would save billions of dollars and decrease fraud by allowing patient review of their own record) should be all we need to know to abolish HCFA and replace it with an entrepreneurial model for encouraging the most modern delivery of health and healthcare at the lowest cost.


I can't really find any discussions on the merits of privatization. I can see how some functions may improve under privatization but most probably would not. The philosophical argument I would make is that there are some things in life that should not be profit driven or market driven.

Certainly HCFA should modernize by implementing secure electronic transmission of forms and payments. But the best argument against the privitization of health insurance is that it increases costs by the additional overhead costs and profit taking. I heard somewhere that Medicare's administrative costs are 15% lower than private insurers.

Privitization without strong government oversight and cost controls can lead to excessive prices. Federal money meant to help insure people would instead go into the coffers of big corporations. Price inflation will continue to accelerate and price people out of the market. The entitlement should be for people, not for corporations.

Thanks again for your help. Any other contributions will be appreciated!