Steve Forbes, chairman of Forbes Media, a two-time candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and Board of Trustees member at The Heritage Foundation, laid out his “reforms that we need to get this country moving again” during a speaking engagement at The Heritage Foundation on Wednesday.
Health Care — “[H]ospitals and clinics have to satisfy the third-party payer, not you, the individual. … The crummiest motel in America wouldn’t dare put you in a room with another guest with a curtain in between, as they routinely do in hospitals. They wouldn’t do it if they thought the patient was really in charge, the patient was really the payer, that they had to satisfy the patient.” He advocates for increased consumer choice and transparent medical service pricing.
Federal Tax Code — “Why waste both massive resources and our best brains on such a stupid, dead-weight, unnecessary activity? Take this beast—I was going to say bury it, but you probably have to get an EPA permit to do it—and just throw the whole thing out.” He advocates for a “straight and simple” federal flat tax.
Monetary Policy — “When you have an unstable currency, since it is the basis of all our interactions, it undermines social trust … And so what we see out there today with all of this instability, we get less investment. When you have lending along with all this regulation on banks deforming the credit markets, you don’t know what the real price of money is. You get a disaster. That’s what we have today.” He advocates for a return to the gold standard and reforms of the Federal Reserve.
Forbes also discussed his new book, Reviving America: How Repealing Obamacare, Replacing the Tax Code and Reforming the Fed Will Restore Hope and Prosperity. He said it is meant to help citizens understand the issues, so they can become advocates in an effort to spur grass-roots pressure on lawmakers.
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