David Schweikert: “Look, in some ways, telling the truth is like soaking yourself in kerosene and running around with a lighter. Congress…”

“Look, in some ways, telling the truth is like soaking yourself in kerosene and running around with a lighter. Congress has functionally become a protection racket. The armies in our hallways, both with Democrats and Republicans, say, ``We like this technology, but,'' and the ``but'' always happens to be, ``you are going to blow up my business model.'' How do we as policymakers stop having the arrogance of thinking we know what the future is and, instead, design the rules, reimbursements, licensing, and mechanisms that all go with that so the best technology is constantly winning and today's winner, it turns out, gets crushed tomorrow because a better one comes along? Today the way we do it is we build walls of protection that say, ``This is good. Yeah, there is something incredibly good over here, but.'' That is why I use that Blockbuster video example. We all sort of accepted that, hey, we used to go get the little silver disk and shove it in the machine. The creepy guy would give us movie recommendations. He was creepy, but his movie recommendations were really good. Today, we go home and hit a button. We just lived through that, and the world didn't come to an end. When it comes to healthcare technology particularly--and I do a similar presentation on environmental technology. There is stunning stuff that could revolutionize those issues.…”