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9/11 memories of a different kind

Mattie Wagner likes to tell people about her daughters, Karen and Kim. All her children, actually. Raised in their home off Gibbs-Sprawl Road in the Judson School District, the sisters were “night and day,” Mattie says.

She tells of the personality traits that separated her daughters. “All my children went into the military, Carl, Warren and Karen, but not Kim.

“No, you couldn't get her out there. She wasn't going to crawl through the grass and get on her knees in the dirt, un-huh.”

But these days, Mattie knows the focus of those around her falls not on her memories, not on the family photos that adorn her shelves, or the scrapbooks that fill a dining room table, but on her daughter's death 10 years ago — when a hijacked American Airlines jet slammed into the Pentagon , killing soldiers, civilians and airline passengers ... and Karen.

A 1979 Judson High School graduate, Lt. Col. Karen Wagner was serving as the Army surgeon general's deputy chief of staff for medical personnel at the time she was killed.

She graduated from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas in 1982 with a degree in business administration.

She was commissioned as a second lieutenant in February 1984, her first assignment with the 85th Evacuation Hospital , Fort Lee, Va. She had just been promoted to lieutenant colonel Aug. 1, 2001.

Mattie says she's grown weary of talking about Sept. 11, the events of the day and the toll it's taken on her family. But Mattie is quick to tell of her daughter's key attributes, and without hesitation tells anyone willing to listen what Karen would say, today, if she was visiting the Judson School District high school named in her honor in 2004.

“Karen's message to today's Wagner student body would be, ‘Treat people like they want to be treated. That's one thing she stood for. If your friend, or your co-worker needs you, be there for them,” Mattie says.

“She would tell them to always be there for your classmates. Be there for them. When they need you, be there.

Pay for U.S. doctors is tops says study | SAN ANTONIO NEWS

Washington, DC, United States (KaiserHealth) - Do U.S. doctors make so much in the U.S. because we pay so much to hedge fund managers?

The competition for top intellectual talent is one possible explanation for a sure-to-be-controversial study published in the latest issue of the policy journal Health Affairs.

The analysis from researchers at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health looked at why the U.S. spends so much more on physician care than Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the U.K. do. And the differences are eye-popping.

In 2008, the U.S. spent roughly $1,600 per person on physician care; the rest of the combined nations that belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, just over $300. That's more than 80 percent less.

And, yes, that higher spending translates into higher incomes for doctors. U.S. primary care doctors, although frequently considered underpaid, nonetheless earned more on average ($186,582 a year, after practice expenses, but before taxes) than primary care doctors in any of the other countries studied. Orthopedic surgeons, the specialists examined in the study, also earned the most in the U.S., with an average salary of $442,450, well above second place U.K. orthopods, at $324,138.

One of the biggest reasons, concluded authors Miriam Laugesen and Sherry Glied, is that doctors in the U.S. get paid more for each service than doctors in those other countries. That's not as obvious as it seems; it rules out the possibility that doctors in the U.S. perform more services (which they apparently do not) or differences in the supply of physicians.

And the main reason for the price differential, it turns out, is that doctors in the U.S.get more of their payments from private rather than public insurers. Private insurers in the U.S. aren't the hardest bargainers around, it turns out.

Now before you point out that doctors in the U.S. have to pay for their own educations, while doctors in Europe and elsewhere generally don't, the researchers took that into account. And while the educational debt close the gap somewhat, "it doesn't seem to explain those differences," Laugesen told Shots.

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