go home, free, no paper work, no copiague, no deductible. they just give you health care. they have it figured out. that is when i started thinking about the system in japan which is good. i covered ted kennedy's race for president in 1980. everywhere he went, he said many other countries to cover their people, why can't we. i got intrigued with that question. how come they can cover everybody with high-quality care, spend as much as we do, how can they do it? i remember our own experiences and that is where the book came from. host: in your book is something called a "bad shoulder." guest: it is my right shoulder. i damaged in the navy. -- and damaged it in the navy. i dislocated my shoulder many times. i was in the u.s. navy. they took me to bethesda naval hospital. they screwed my shoulder to get there. it worked fine and we are getting old and now my shoulder only goes this type. i set off to see how other countries provide high-quality health care. i thought i would get my shoulder fixed to see what other health-care look like. guest: what year was this? host: 1972 wa

companies selling health care policies that are so expensive that there is no deductible and no copiague, -- copay, there's no incentive to keep people from camping in their doctor's office. what we're talking about and the president mentioned the other night was putting a tax on these high in insurance policies so as to discourage companies from issuing those, have them pay an excise tax where a family policy would be over $22,000 in premiums each year, or something. the average in new mexico is $11,500 each year. we're talking about of rarefy small group of policies, but it does talk about -- according to experts, help was reduce the over utilization of the system. dollars senator bingaman, are you satisfied at the level of political and just lets -- legislative support that you're gone from president obama and majority leader read? >> i think the president has made this his top priority. he had been very up-front about that. he has been in regular communication with us. when i was working on the bill we reported out of the help committee, he was in regular communication. he had been i

-- $5,000 -- $5,000 deposit or $2,000 in copiague. >> it depends on what the insurance companies to. the answer is yes. we do not have any contracts with insurance companies that require patients to come to us. they are coming of their own choice. we would really like to see a reform so anyone can come to the mayo clinic who needs our top of care. i'm hoping to reform will be able to answer the questions and that we get rid of some of those problems. >> what is the ratio of highest to lowest doctor salaries at mail? how does it compare with the country at large? are changes necessary to track primary-care physicians question marks the ratio is about 2 to 1, roughly. it is in that ballpark. the fact of the matter is that what we do in our organization, we do a market assessment of organizations that are like us. that is our said our salaries, and around the 8% range of the benchmark organizations that are like us -- 80%. we tend to pay our primary care and pediatrics a little more than they would get otherwise, and we tend to pay our higher pay people a little less than they would get