News and commentary for the week of November 21-27, 2007 with Mike Kaspar and Nathan Callahan.

News and commentary for the week of November 14-20, 2007 with Mike Kaspar and Nathan Callahan.

An interview with Paul V. Dutton author of "Differential Diagnoses: A Comparative History of Health Care Problems and Solutions in the United States and France."

Although the United States spends 16 percent of its gross domestic product on health care, more than 46 million people have no insurance coverage, while one in four Americans report difficulty paying for medical care. Indeed, the U.S. health care system, despite being the most expensive health care system in the world, ranked thirty-seventh in a comprehensive World Health Organization report. With health care spending only expected to increase, Americans are again debating new ideas for expanding coverage and cutting costs.

According to the historian Paul V. Dutton, Americans should look to France, whose health care system captured the World Health Organization's number-one spot.

Dutton debunks a common misconception among Americans that European health care systems are essentially similar to each other and vastly different from U.S. health care. In fact, the Americans and the French both distrust "socialized medicine." Both peoples cherish patient choice, independent physicians, medical practice freedoms, and private insurers in a qualitatively different way than the Canadians, the British, and many others.

Dutton is an Associate Professor of History at Northern Arizona University.

News and commentary for the week of November 7-13, 2007 with Mike Kaspar and Nathan Callahan.

News and commentary for the week of October 31 - November 6, 2007 with Mike Kaspar and Nathan Callahan.

News and commentary for the week of October 24-30, 2007 with Mike Kaspar and Nathan Callahan.

An interview with Norman Solomon author of "Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America's Warfare State."

Since he was first under FBI surveillance at age 14 in the mid-1960s, Norman Solomon has been on a collision course with what he calls "the warfare state."

In his latest book "Made Love, Got War" Solomon recounts his controversial trips to Baghdad and Tehran with Sean Penn as well as televised showdowns with Judith Miller and other pro-war journalists before the invasion of Iraq. Made Love, Got War blends personal reflections with social commentary and firsthand accounts of Solomon's activism and reporting from the late 1960s to present-day Tehran.

In his foreword, Daniel Ellsberg writes that the book "helps us understand where we are now and how we got here." The Pentagon Papers whistleblower concludes: "I was born in 1931, and my generation had to reorient itself to the unprecedented threat of planetary nuclear suicide-murder. Norman Solomon was born twenty years later, and his generation has never lived under any other circumstance. The strands of this book form a unique weave of personal narrative and historical inquiry. 'Made Love, Got War' lays out a half-century of socialized insanity that has brought a succession of aggressive wars under cover of - but at recurrent risk of detonating - a genocidal nuclear arsenal. We need to help each other to awaken from this madness."