My friend Lido (“Lee”) Bruhl is a true believer in universal health care. He continues to campaign for a single payer system. “And yet we still have all these vehement protests that our health care system is fine just the way it is,” he said this morning.

Not from me. I vehemently protest that ObamaCare will take a health care system that delivers decent care for way too much money and turn it it to a system that delivers lesser care for way more than way too much money.

Lee took a new tack. “The US already spends more on health care than most other nations, but it gets less,” he said.

Semi-true. Here’s another one: The US already spends more on primary and secondary education than most other nations, but it gets less. And this: The US spent more “stimulus money” on job creation than any other nation, but it got fewer jobs created.

A better question to examine is this: Why do we as a nation throw so much cash at problems and get such a (relatively) poor return?