This is John Batchel, a conversation with Joseph Sternberg of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal.

He's in London about the European Union and the European Union and European affair of America's

extravagant health care system, which, of course, is the envy of the planet.

And why is it that Europe regards it as a negative? And why is it that Europe

doesn't have one like it? And why don't they want it? All good questions. Here's Joe addressing

the success of the American health care system as part of the success of America. And the Europeans?

Puzzling. More of this tonight.

Yeah, and, you know, that's sort of an example of how Europeans have not, one thing that they have not yet internalized about America and the secret to our success is so much of it has to do with

where you as a society are going to allocate your resources and what you value.

So they talk about the fact that Americans spend such a large proportion of our national GDP on health care as if that's a bad thing.

I mean, there is a lot of waste in the American system.

A lot of misspent money, we're probably spending more money than we should,

but I mean, what we get for it is phenomenal. I mean, the quality of care that you have an

opportunity to access in America is amazing compared to what's often available in Europe.

So America has a health care financing

problem, but Europe has a health care availability problem. And I think that that kind of issue

is the sort of thing where they really need a lot of creative thinking and they need to take a hard

look at themselves and the decisions

that they've been making for the past couple generations and ask are these decisions really good

for Europeans as human beings who would benefit from the availability of better health care?

And also is this good for our economy? Are we setting up to allocate resources to the kind of

innovation that we want to encourage?

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