For those of us living in the United States, we know that our health care system is broken. We know it is broken in a thousand different ways. This is a recent and most telling example:

Premature labor drug spikes from $10 to $1,500

Whether that price spike is caused by pure, unregulated money-grubbing greed, or whether there is a legitimate reason for it (caused by things like insurance costs, lawsuit risk, etc.), the system is broken.

The health care reform act passed one year ago today is supposed to help ease some of the brokenness.

On NPR today, on the Diane Rehm show, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius did an interview. And it really was a very good interview. She comes across as a competent, knowledgeable, concerned person who is leading the charge toward a less broken health care system.

One thing she talked about is a system on Healthcare.gov that allows you to see, for the first time, pricing information about available health care plans. The good news is that such a system is now available, and it allows multi-way sorting of the results. The bad news is that the complexity becomes very high – when I ty it, there are 195 plans listed in my area – and there is no way for people to see any comments, stars, or any other feedback, so there is really no way to know which plans work well and which ones do not.

During the program, one woman called in with a very typical situation. She has three members in her family – husband, wife, son – living in Massachusetts. She is self-employed. Her premium is $1,600 per month with a $5,000 annual deductible. That means her annual health care costs for a family of three are:

$1,600 * 12 + $5,000 = $24,200.

$24,200. She said she had gone to Healthcare.gov to look for cheaper options and really there was no way around paying $24,200 per year. That is a broken system. Everyone in the country is required to have health care coverage, but the cost is amazingly high.

Secretary Sebelius indicated that premium prices should moderate as provisions of the health care reform act kick in. If that occurs it would be great, but what is the likelihood of prices ever falling? They might rise less quickly (single-digit increases instead of multi-digit), but no matter how you slice it, $24,200 per year is untenable for anyone who has to pay premiums themselves. That is nearly half of the U.S. median income level.