In a world that increasingly moves at digital speed, we humans are painfully slow and selective processors of information.

We'll get through a couple of paragraphs of, say, a Paul Krugman op-ed in The New York Times about fiscal policy. But then we see something shiny in the marginalia about, oh, Jennifer Lawrence or Bradley Cooper, and faster than we can process the meaning of "Keynesian," we're off to tangent city.

Which explains, in part, why surveys indicate that many of us don't "get" health care reform.

President Barack Obama's historic Affordable Care Act of 2010 is an ambitious, tightly woven road map intended to eventually lead most Americans to better care while controlling costs, all without scrapping what passes for a free market in the health care world.

While we've been singularly focused on the constitutionality of the "act" portion of the Affordable Care Act these past three years -- a matter settled last summer by the U.S. Supreme Court -- I spotted a shiny bit of insight recently that might refocus our collective attention on that underappreciated "affordable" part.

A report by a pair of nonprofits, the Health Care Incentives Improvement Institute and the Catalyst for Payment Reform (love the acronym, CPR), graded each state based on how its laws shield medical billing from public view and thus make it difficult to comparison shop. (Lest you think this a guerilla attack, the nation's largest employers, including Boeing, General Electric and Wal-Mart, are all part of the CPR collective.)

How did the states fare? The report gave 29 of them an F and seven a D, meaning that 36 out of 50 states in our union think you can't handle the truth when it comes to the true cost of your own care. Only those annoying overachievers Massachusetts and New Hampshire earned an A.

So how do these obscure laws translate to the price of milk? Funny you should ask, because there's a report for that, too.

In 2011, the nonprofit Institute of Medicine issued "The Healthcare Imperative: Lowering Costs and Improving Outcomes." It found that since 1999, health care costs had increased by 131 percent while everyday salaries had risen by an average of 35 percent.

If groceries had gone up as fast as health care costs since 1945, the report says, you'd be paying around $48 for a gallon of milk, $55 for a dozen eggs and $134 for a dozen oranges today.

See the rest here:

Health care reform and $48 milk