Health care costs are out of control because market forces were long ago peeled out of the system. One of the many inconvenient truths of economics is that when you subsidize something, either privately or from the government, the cost of that thing tends to rise (see also: higher education).

...the financial incentives for both providers and patients tend to encourage the adoption of more expensive treatments and procedures, even if evidence of their relative effectiveness is limited. For doctors and hospitals, these incentives stem from fee-for-service reimbursement, which encourages providers to deliver a given service efficiently but also creates an incentive to supply additional or more expensive services — as long as the payment exceeds the costs. Insured patients, for their part, generally pay only a portion of the costs of their care and, consequently, have only limited financial incentives to seek lower-cost treatments; this is a trade-off inherent in having insurance protection.

We need to get back to the point where insurance was about covering catastrophic illnesses, not everything.