John Doolittle: “We do. We have some friends that lived in Germany, and when they would come over to the United States, one was an…”

“We do. We have some friends that lived in Germany, and when they would come over to the United States, one was an American citizen married to a German national, they would come over and they would spend the first day or two at the dentist's office, which I always thought was odd. That wouldn't be the first thing I would want to do if I came back home to the United States. But in Germany, you can't get preventive dental care, and so you have to wait until they have a tooth fall out or a cavity or something. And it was real frustrating. They would come over and get their teeth cleaned and have different kinds of work done. But I always thought, what a strange thing. You know, you hear about these socialistic single-payer systems; for years they were extolled. I think the glamour of this has sort of worn off. In fact, I have heard it said that those kinds of systems are great if you are healthy, but if you have a serious problem like you were talking about with your father, people come here, because we have the competition, we have the highly trained experts that can diagnose, that can treat, that can perform these miraculous types of surgeries. And we need to improve the system because it still isn't really driven enough by market forces. And that is what really the seeds for transformation of the whole health care system, private and public, were in that Medicare prescription drug bill.…”