Jonquilyn Hill

What can consumers do to try to mitigate these costs?

It's getting expensive.

What can we do?

It's really hard.

There are a number of people who think that price transparency is a big help.

It's probably not the answer to everything, but knowing what things cost in advance certainly doesn't hurt.

Being able to shop around for elective things also doesn't hurt.

Sometimes, you know, if you go to a hospital, you can find the same care as an outpatient for much less because of the complicated ways that government and private insurers pay for these things.

Sometimes you can offer to pay cash instead of use your insurance and you can save money.

That's very true for things like generic drugs.

So there are ways to save some money, but we're all sort of captives of the mess of a health care system that we have right now.

OK, so everyone is focused on premiums right now because they're going up.

But that's just one symptom of what is going on with our health care system, right?

Like there's a bigger problem here.

There definitely is.

And the health and obviously Republicans are saying, you know, we're over subsidizing for the ACA, which is a mess.

Well, we subsidize everybody else who gets health insurance.

Federal government subsidizes Medicare.

Federal and state governments subsidize Medicaid.

There's a gigantic tax break for people who have employer-provided coverage that most people aren't even aware of.