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to me, an affordable health insurance plan would be between $50-$100 a month.Fat chance of that happening. And if it did, the deductible would be so high as to make the plan worthless for anything short of a car-crash-emergency-type-situation.
This fits a fair number of cost complaints I hear over healthcare. Who wouldn't like to pay $50-100/month to have something better than emergency healthcare support? But think about the costs of such a system, regardless of inefficiencies / the problems of the current system that make things cost hundreds of thousands:
Doctors and nurses and supporting staff must exist. So must hospitals. They are highly trained, and will be expensive - period. They also have to keep learning, so they can't be busy making money all the time. And they must have such people available all the time, or people die.
Given that, and the equipment and check-up and hospital time, how much should a minor surgery cost? Not in cost to you, in cost. If the cost to you is mitigated in any way, it's extracted another way (taxes). I'd have trouble seeing it cost less than a few thousand dollars in the best, highly-used system. That's a lot of training and a lot of supporting necessities for any random surgery.
At $50-100/month, they would have to sap you for nearly a decade to make up a single surgery. It might even out for the insurance company if that was it - but certainly not when you get older, and not with any kind of routine, preventative care. Scale that up to emergency situations where major surgery and years of rehab for even 0.1% of the people they're covering - how many hundreds of years does that cost everyone on the plan?
Cataclysmic health insurance is cheap because it only covers cataclysms. Because one in a hundred lives cost an utterly enormous amount more than a single person generates.
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None of this is to say that I think the healthcare system is efficient by any means, nor not full of corruption, waste, frivolous lawsuits, or damaging dogma. Merely that there is simply a bottom limit that the prices that people want to pay will never be able to support, unless all cataclysmic protection is dropped. And would you rather die from a car crash, or be rehab'd for a couple years and continue your life for another 60 years? So people choose the cataclysmic protection, and prices jump.
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edit: because this seems it will come up often, some evidence for my claim based on Canada's setup, copied from another comment I made below: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_care_in_Canada
>In 2009, the government funded about 70% of Canadians' health care costs.
>Per capita expenditure in 2009: 3,895
$227 per month, per person, comes from the government, which means it comes from taxes. And an additional $100 per person is spent per month on average ($324.58 per month). Far in excess of $50-$100.