That was the message Wednesday from former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, who warned a Salt Lake City audience that "just as we couldn't sustain Wall Street and we couldn't sustain housing, you cannot sustain consistently breaking the economic rules without paying a huge price." After leaving Congress in 1999, Gingrich founded the Center for Health Transformation.

It advocates reform that centers on preventive care and the private insurance market, improving choice and quality while lowering costs.

Speaking as part of Intermountain Healthcare's Healthy Dialogues series, Gingrich said it's possible for Americans to live longer, healthier lives and have full insurance coverage - but it requires changing more than just how the health care system is financed.

"The current system is designed to expand to absorb the amount of money available, so the current system will be permanently underfunded," he said.

Instead, Gingrich said, the country needs a personalized and intelligent system with the goal of insuring every single American.

And that system starts with you. With personal responsibility as the starting point, Gingrich said, people will live longer, healthier lives at a lower cost. And with the savings, "you can find a way to insure 300 million Americans."

Take diabetes, he said, the largest single cost driver of Medicare. It cannot be managed by a doctor or nurse alone; patients must work to improve their diets and to exercise.

Gingrich - who acknowledged he needs to lose weight, too - advocates two national goals: exercise every day for 30 minutes, and for the overweight, lose at least 10 pounds.

Among his suggestions:

* Schools should require K-12 physical education daily and make their breakfast and lunch menus more nutritious. Children who live within a mile should walk to school and digital scales should be in every classroom.

* Improve how health care is provided, including the better use of technology. Best practices - both in medicine and management - should be adopted nationwide, and reinforced with financial rewards.

"What if we were to take the worst hospitals and migrate them up to being comparable with the best? It would actually save us an enormous amount of pain, it would improve the health outcome of the patients, and it would save a lot of money," he said. "But today we have zero mechanisms for doing this."

* The federal government - the largest purchaser of health care - should invest in moving it in the right direction, Gingrich said. That includes wiping out fraud, which could result in $70 billion to $200 billion a year in savings. lrosetta@sltrib.com

Newt Gingrich

Making his House debut in 1978, Newt Gingrich was re-elected 10 times from Georgia's 6th Congressional District. He was the primary architect of the Contract with America, leading to the Republican Party's takeover of the House in 1994, and became the first speaker of the House from his side of the aisle in 40 years.