If your health insurance has on gone up 20% in the last six or seven years consider yourself lucky. The cost of healthcare has been increasing at a rapid pace for years. Compare a hospital stay cost ten years ago to today. Or even more dramatically so a surgical procedure. Insurance rates rise accordingly.

Chi, my co-pay has gone up 50% in one year. My daughter's insurance deductible went up a thousand bucks in one year. I don't consider myself "lucky" when the point of Obama's promise with Obamacare was to lower the cost of health care. The fact is that it is now more expensive AND the gov is now demanding that you purchase a product or be punished for not buying it. The only people that made out are the lazy young adults that can ride on their parent's policy and the lazy that get medicaid that already had it available. Smart and logical proposals by the Republicans were ignored, such as tort reform and open market, across border insurance purchase. Those two ideas would have lowered the price of health care. But, Obama did not want to improve health care, he wanted it to fail so that it would be easier to provide gov mandated and controlled socialized medicine further down the line. Typical socialist and anarchist strategy, ruin something and then take control.

I understand your frustration and feel the same economic pain. My post was more about the cost of healthcare itself. I was an account manager for a large med/surg supply company and heard many times from the materials managers how supply costs were driving up hospital stays. In actuality, supply costs are only 10% of a hospital's budget. Factors such as labor and the physical plant weigh in a way higher percentage. But for years the cost of suppliers was the focal point.

Oniy lately has the emphasis shifted to implementing efficiencies and reducing redundancies to achieve cost reduction. We have a long way to go.