First Real Post (pretty lame) I figure one of the ways to create ideas is to just read through the paper and see what some of the latest news is. I was doing this today and came across an article that I immediately questioned. The headline was: U.S. Health-care costs per person highest in the world.

My immediate thought was "so what?". Of course we have the highest per capita health-care. We also have the best heath care. You get what you pay for.

The article said we pay 50% more than the next highest country. This sounds like a lot more, but I was still skeptical.

The article then goes on to say that things most people might think about such as malpractice insurance to completely explain the gap. In fact, malpractice premiums can only explain about 1% of the gap. They also said that physicians tend to order more tests than they need to just to protect themselves against malpractice suits, but this only accounts for another 9%.

I still contend that you get what you pay for and that we get better healthcare than any other country. I've talked with other people in other countries and most of them have complaints about the quality of their healthcare. I believe that in the US, our only real complaint is about the cost of our healthcare. To me that seems like a better problem to have.

I get tired of all the socialized medicine pressures. When I talk to people in the UK, Canada, or Australia, they all complain that they cannot get the help they need when they need it. The fact that it is free helps them a little bit, but what they really need is the healthcare and its not there for them. I have also heard from these people that when they do get their operations that it is not what they were hoping for. The quality does not seem to be as great as it is here.

Anyway... I'll through this out as a first post. Hopefully, I'll get some more time and some more ideas later, so we can have some more thought provoking discussions.  ¶ 4:23 PM