By Bobby Jindal and Hannah Anderson

It’s your dollar.

This year, American families will spend more than $37,000 on private health care, while the average family on Obamacare will spend about $27,000. The per-person cost of health care in America? Nearly $16,000 for every man, woman and child. That’s $5 trillion of the American economy. Yet most Americans could not tell you where even one of those health dollars went.

That cost—and the mystery of where those dollars go—is the result of two decades of putting patients last. Policymakers have handed control to bureaucrats and middlemen who choose where and how you spend your health care dollars. The result of this patients-last policy has been to turn every health dollar into a health insurance dollar. Health insurance, a tool created for emergencies, is now covering primary care and generic drugs—and doing all of it badly.

How bad is it? Your health insurance—designed as a financial tool to protect you from catastrophic loss—is now being used to finance a $140 doctor’s office visit or a $3 generic prescription. Consider a healthy American patient with very good insurance. She pays $200 a month in personal premiums (not counting employer contributions in lieu of compensation) and still must meet a $1,600 deductible before her coverage kicks in. She goes to the dermatologist and thinks the visit costs $140. In fact, that routine visit costs her $2,640. She used her health insurance to finance a purchase that would have been cheaper even on a high-interest credit card.

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