These days, America’s worst illness seems to be our broken health care system. Recent discussion of health care reform has got everyone debating how to fix our sickly patchwork system. So what is the answer to fixing it? No one is clamoring for health insurance, really, we just want decent health care that doesn’t cost and arm and a leg (or a pancreas). People want to lay the blame at the feet of the usual suspects (politicians, lawyers, liberals, conservatives, overweight people, rich people, poor people, etc.), but let’s be real — we Americans are victims of our own success. We have the best and most innovative health care in the world. Our doctors, scientists and researchers drive improved health care across the globe. Trouble is, no one wants to pay for it. For all of our technical innovation, we are doing a terrible job managing the money part. For a capitalist country, this is pretty shameful. All other developed countries have public health care and yet spend less money per person on health care than we do in the U.S. How could this be? Is it because we use more advanced treatments that cost more? Do doctors use too many tests to avoid malpractice lawsuits? Is it because the uninsured rely on emergency room care? How can we bring costs down? Who knows? This doctor has some interesting ideas for health care reform (tort reform; make insurance more like car insurance, with points off for healthy behavior — how do you monitor that, though?; emphasize quality of life, not length of life, for terminal care, where lots of our health care dollars are spent — and, no, this does not mean death panels; make insurance plans more competitive) but we might need the government to make these ideas into law. While you ruminate on all this, go ahead and test your health care reform debate knowledge with this quiz over at CNN (Sadly, I only got 5 out of 8 correct. Sigh.).