PROFESSOR NEWT?….Over at Suburban Guerrilla, Susan comments on Newt Gingrich’s latest foray into public policy. She says he’s thinking like an academic:
Academics don’t know how to think like poor people. How would they? I was reading a piece Newt Gingrich wrote for today’s Post about Medicaid, and he talked about removing the option for using emergency rooms as expensive primary care.
See, I immediately understood the dilemma: Poor people go to the emergency rooms because they’re always open and they don’t have to take time off from work. That’s how you think when you’re poor.
If Newt knew anything at all about scraping bottom in the real world, he’d know the way to deal with the problem is to offer financial incentives to medical practices with night and weekend hours. His tunnel vision leads to people not seeing a doctor at all.
Tunnel vision? Nah. Newt knows this stuff backward and forward. He just doesn’t care. He’s not thinking like an academic, he’s thinking like a Republican.
