Last week we asked readers for ideas on getting Americans back to work and improving access to education. You sent in hundreds of ideas, from including children as active participants in schools’ curriculum development to expanding the capabilities of online education.

Let’s keep this ball rolling!

Today we want to know: How can we fix the underlying problems with the health care system? Costs are rising, doctors are pushing unnecessary treatments, and plenty of us still can’t even get insured. You can share your idea here with a reblog, or on Twitter with the hashtag #JustFixIt. We’ll share our favorites.

Might as well throw some news into the mix since we are Newsweek. Today’s main event is another dissing of Obama’s health care plan. Things appear partisan, as always. The latest count: two judges appointed by Republican presidents have struck down the law or its main attribute, while two judges appointed by Democrats have upheld it. Better get ready, Supreme Court. Here’s the main issue, according to Florida Judge Roger Vinson:

At issue here, as in the other cases decided so far, is the assertion that the Commerce Clause can only reach individuals and entities engaged in an “activity”; and because the plaintiffs maintain that an individual’s failure to purchase health insurance is, almost by definition, “inactivity,” the individual mandate goes beyond the Commerce Clause and is unconstitutional. The defendants contend that activity is not required before Congress can exercise its Commerce Clause power, but that, even if it is required, not having insurance constitutes activity.

lindsayrobertson:

No matter how innocuous your symptoms may seem, the internet will always tell you you’re going to die from them.

In 2005, having already made two fortunes—as a Microsoft executive and then as CEO of Drugstore .com— Peter Neupert returned to Microsoft to create software for health-care providers. His division, the Health Solutions Group, now has 800 employees and sells to hospitals nationwide. Neupert’s basic premise, oversimplified, is that one key to improving health care involves installing modern software that can make the system more efficient and ultimately enable patients to get better service at a lower cost. The need for this kind of change is obvious to anyone who, like myself, is hitting the age when we need to see doctors more often and/or is the parent of young kids. Keeping track of our health information is a complicated kludge just begging to be digitized. Why is it so easy for me to manage a 7,000 song music collection, yet so hard for me to keep track of my kids’ vaccinations? We now do almost everything online: banking, travel planning, shopping. But when we go to the doctor we still do things pretty much the way we did them a half century ago. Too much still gets done on paper. Even when your medical information is stored digitally, the data often can’t be shared among providers.

Lyons, on Microsoft’s big health care push.

Romano is really good in this

The reality is that patients want to have a say in what happens to them when they’re sick and, more often than not, they don’t want heroic and often hugely costly measures to save them. In the new study, researchers found that more than 90 percent of the adults who had living wills requested either limited care or “comfort care” at the end of life. Only 1.9 percent (a total of ten patients out of 3,746) asked for “all care possible.” Aggressive medicine does not equal happy patients. Doctors must acknowledge this and have honest and informative conversations with their patients. In another study, published in 2008, researchers found that end-of-life discussions resulted in less aggressive care-including ventilation and resuscitation-and earlier hospice enrollment, which equaled better quality of life for patients.

Claudia Kalb, on end of life care

If Congress is mostly Democrats, why is there an anti-abortion-rights majority in the House? Because Republicans treat abortion as a litmus test, while Democrats don’t.

Sarah Kliff: You can be a Congressional Democrat and be anti-abortion rights, but if you’re a Congressional Republican you must be anti-abortion rights. A look at how that skews our politics.

Sarah Kliff is pretty great deconstructing this talking point some Republicans are throwing around.

As I see it, there are three principal requirements for the job. The first is experience in management, business, and organization: maybe someone who’s worked as a management consultant, an entrepreneur, and an executive in both the public and private sectors. The second is the ability and capacity to commit: someone who isn’t likely to have any pressing obligations for the next several years, and who has enough cash that he or she doesn’t need a large private-sector salary. Third is relevant experience in implementing a large-scale health-care reform program, ideally one that involved using an individual mandate and the private insurance system to attain near-universal health insurance.

In other words, this sounds like a job for Mitt Romney.

Gross, on who should be Obama’s Health Czar

Fineman, on why the insurance companies love Obama