"Americans spend too much on medical care" - It cannot be called a false statement. You know something is not right when a brief visit to the emergency room can cost several thousand dollars or when a course of a new cancer drug runs $100,000.

The truth of the mater is that Americans now spend more on healthcare each year than on food.

The President recently offered health reform that is largely a rehash of the Senate's trillion-dollar bill--with a small little difference that the Obama version would tax even more and spend more to fatten Medicaid to quiet angry governors and protect from excise taxes expensive Cadillac health plans (ranging up to $27,500) favored by unions.

The question arises - How can health reform take place, in actuality this time around? This might be one solution; If our opaque and often secretive health-payment system were made transparent, the ground would be laid for consumers to find better premiums and prices for their families. One way to do this would be through open, fair, and guaranteed access, for any citizen, to competing insurers anywhere in the country.

Reforms take place out open in the world, not at Summits. Saying that "breaking the healthcare cost curve is doable" is not the rhetoric of the summit but rather the mounds of data on health spending that show it's not profligate overuse of hospitals and drugs or neglect of preventive care that accounts for higher medical costs here than in other countries.

Americans pay the highest prices in the world for pharmaceuticals, averaging $878 per person per year versus $461 in Europe. That is a big reason that America spends more than 16 percent of its gross domestic product on healthcare, compared with Europe's average of 9 percent. There is a lot of room for lowering prices.

Bringing down, not just slowing down, bloated healthcare prices is part of that solution.