If you cut my insurance rates in half, I would be delighted to pay a doctor $75 instead of a $20 co pay for an office visit. But that isn't the issue.

Several years ago, I caught my thumb in a table saw. Yeah, ouch. So I had an ambulance ride, an x-ray, a tetanus shot, some morphine, and they cleaned the wound and sewed it up (about 45 man-minutes of care from a physician and nurse). Personally, I'm seeing somewhere around $500 worth of care being provided there. Yet the bill was $15K. Sure, insurance knocked the out-of-pocket cost down to around $400, but that is a completely unjustifiable and totally deranged bill for barely over an hour of care (if you include the ambulance ride).

Similarly, the wife had an appendectomy several years ago. That was about a 15 hour hospital stay. Bills were $30K.

We don't have a health insurance crisis in this country, we have a cost of health care crisis. And no plan proposed by either party has done a darned thing about the real problem.