Here is a great interview with Paul.
http://www.firebirdnation.com/forums/index.php?automodule=blog&blogid=1&showentry=69Talking about the war.Do you now feel some sort of moral obligation to clean up the mess?There is a moral consequence to what we've caused, but none of you have a moral responsibility. I don't think I should take your resources to go over there and rebuild Iraq. The moral consequence should be on those who committed the errors in our foreign policy, but that's about 24 people. It's 24 neoconservatives who took over our foreign policy. They should be responsible, and they don't have to pay for it. That's not practical, and that's not going to happen. As sympathetic as I am, I cannot further tax the American people to rebuild Iraq. I would say the best thing to do is work out something where the wealth that they have, the oil, is used to do that. We, the American people, were taxed to build bombs to go over and break up their infrastructure—to bomb highways and bridges. And now we're being taxed to rebuild them. At the same time, we're running out of money and our bridges here are falling down. We have to quit. It's time to take care of our own bridges.
You are for an immediate pull out?
Yes. Immediate is not 24 hours. Immediate is as quickly as you can. It is talking to the military and figuring out how long it is going to take—not five years. You tell them that we are no longer going to have 14 permanent military bases and that we are going to turn the embassy, which is bigger than the Vatican, over to some charity or something. Just change the attitude about the way we assume that we own these countries. I think it's the change in attitude that we need to take care of. Maybe it will take three or four or five months to take care of it.
Smaller governmentYou're for a large scale back of federal agencies like FEMA. What would your alternative to aid be?Local government and guard units should help out. These houses that have been burned down—95 percent of them are insured. And insurance should pay for it. People take a risk, and they should suffer the consequences. They should buy insurance. New Orleans is still not rebuilt. Central economic planning doesn't work. The whole thing is the opposite of resuming responsibility for ourselves and having local government handle it.
HealthcareAs a doctor, what do you see as the best solution to our health-care problem?Get rid of managed care. Managed care created this corporatization that we have. The corporations make most of the money. The patients come up shortchanged. The doctors don't like it. Hospitals are going broke. We put mandates that hospitals have to take care of illegal aliens, and hospitals are closing. Managed care came with the Arista laws and the tax laws of the 1970s, and we've created a middle man, a third-party payment system, and that's why in Washington, a $30 billion-industry is lobbied by drug companies and HMOs, all the management companies, and they invest a lot of money.
Actually, the AMA has joined in the lobbying. They lobby for managed care, they don't lobby for patient rights. But you have to change the tax code and let people get out of the system and let people get all their money back from medical care from tax credits and move in that transition. If we don't change it now, we're going to wind up with socialized medicine, and we can look to the other countries to get a doctor. It's a real mess. We put so many prohibitions in choices in medicine. If you want alternative medicine, health insurance won't pay for it.
Or if you want nutritional products from a free market, the drug companies take over and have a monopoly on it. You can't get your nutritional products, and I think the other thing is that there is too much monopolization on medical care through licensing. Organized medicine has created monopolies and the prices go up. The other reason for high prices is because of legal procedures. We as physicians have to practice very defensive medicine, and that's an issue that has been addressed in some states out of necessity. It has become expensive because you order way more tests than you actually need because you're worried on Monday morning that the attorney is going to come to your door to take you to court.
