CONCORD, N.H. (AP) – Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich sounded more like Newt Gingrich, M.D., on Friday, diagnosing major ailments in the way the government handles everything from health care to electing presidents, and prescribing major changes to cure them.

“Modern government essentially is an 1880 male clerk on a wooden high stool with a quill pen being dipped into an open ink well, modernized by a 1935 bureaucracy using a manual typewriter to type on carbon paper,” Gingrich told a Statehouse audience. “It is literally incapable of keeping up with the modern world.”

A modern world, he said, in which most people carry cell phones that take photos, shipping companies are more efficient than government and gas pumps are considered so smart that most people don’t even take credit card receipts after filling up.

His criticism bordered on ridicule, saying illegal immigrants have better tools than the officials looking for them.

“Everybody coming across the border is using a cell phone and blackberry (communication device) to figure out how to get across and everybody trying to stop them uses carbon paper,” said Gingrich, who is considering running for president in 2008.

Gingrich is pushing “21st Century, intelligent, efficient government,” especially in health care. He suggests changes in everything from the way people view their own health to the way they pay for their medicine.

He also called for major political changes, including having early campaign events in New Hampshire and Iowa involve all parties.

“If I can get all the Republicans in the room, I can say amazingly mean, vicious and nasty things and all of my partisans are excited,” he said, and the Democrats can do the same.

“You maximize the poison in the system,” he said. With audiences of Republicans, Democrats, independents and others “you cannot sustain the viciousness” and candidates will talk about real problems.

He also would dump presidential debates in favor of having candidates “sit on a stage and chat for 90 minutes.”

“Presidential debates are a Mickey Mouse exercise in memorizing junk the consultants design by looking at focus groups so you can try to guess what stupid question the media announcer is going to ask you, so for 90 seconds, you can parrot what you memorize,” he said.

His health plan calls for Americans to be able to store and refer to health records online, setting up personal savings and reimbursement accounts, and changing prescription insurance coverage.

Gingrich urged New Hampshire to set up a state or regional drug purchasing cooperative, run similar to online services for booking flights or hotel rooms. A patient would call up a computer screen showing all the medicine available for the ailment, with the prices.

He suggested switching copayment plans so patients pay after buying medicine. Copayments, he suggested, are a hurdle to buying medicine and give patients an incentive to buy expensive drugs, because they pay the same either way.

A plan in which the state pays for the least expensive prescription drug for state employees would allow for savings, he said, especially if employees were allowed to buy cheaper medicine and have half the savings go into their reimbursement or health savings accounts.

Though the topic was health care, the backdrop, as usual in the earliest primary state, was politics.

Gingrich is raising issues about health, education, energy, the environment and national security to prompt questions for any candidates in the next campaign.

He said if no one thinks his ideas are worthwhile, or if five or six other candidates adopt them, he probably won’t run.

“But, if I go and I articulate these ideas and people like them, but the candidates don’t pick them up, then probably, I’ll run,” he said.

AP-ES-10-07-05 1726EDT