We heard from Steve Forbes at the Heritage Foundation luncheon today. He's a great speaker, short, straight to the point, precise, succinct. Talking about health care, he advocates putting people in charge of their asset and people will get values for their money. Example is the LASIK eye surgery procedure, which has gone down dramatically in cost over the last few years, partly because it's not covered by insurance and people spend their own money. Both the provider and consumer contributed in driving down the cost. Just like everything else when it's left to free market and competition. On the same topic of health care, people will automatically get generic drug without anyone having to tell them so if they pay for it with money from their own health saving accounts. We should do away with health insurance as we know it. Expand health saving accounts and catastrophic insurance instead.

An innovative way of improving health care is people seeing specialists. Put a specialist in a round table with ten or fifteen people. In an hour or two, the specialist can see 15 people, which is a great rate for the specialist. The people can be relax instead being hurry through. They will have all their questions answered. Questions they may not even think of before may pop up during those two hours and they can get them answered as well.

Talking about Washington DC, the slogan he has is "No lobbyist left behind." One ridiculous example is the fact that Starbucks defined crushing coffee beans as manufacturing. The tax code, about 9 million words in all, is beyond anyone's comprehension and every day Joe is held accountable for it when IRS people who answer the phone do not even know what they are talking about most of the time. Contrast that with the Bible, which has about 770,000 words, took 40 writers from three different continents over 1,600 years to complete. He's advocating for the flat tax, the first $46K is not being taxed, 17 cent per dollar after that. And no death tax, in another word, no taxation without respiration.

Talking about 2008 presidential election, Democrat Bill Richardson, governor of New Mexico, may not be that bad of a candidate at all. He cut state income tax by almost half, and also cut capital gain tax.

Last topic he touched on is the current war against Islamic terrorists. The ideology is not new. It's only a mutation of marxism and communism. Ultimately free people will win.