Forget for a moment that public hospitals can't cope with rising demand and elective surgery patients are lingering in pain. We are getting rorted by specialist doctors.
It's a system where the government pays, the patient pays and the doctor smiles before he or she slaps you with a monstrous bill.
I took notice last year when AAP's Los Angeles correspondent Peter Mitchell criticised the fees charged by health care providers in the US.
His wife gave birth to a baby boy and the bill come to over $A50,000, but it was completely covered by their $A418 monthly payments for US health insurance.
I have recently confronted a mirror experience as an American journalist living in Australia.
But I calculate that Peter paid less in out-of-pocket costs during his wife's pregnancy than my wife and I did in Sydney.
We initially decided on the public health system for the birth of our son until we caught sight of our local hospital's maternity ward: a demountable structure.
We were also told that the NSW government had recently closed the maternity ward at a nearby hospital.
The deal-breaker came when I asked what would be the medical response to an emergency birth.
Answer: a helicopter to transport my wife to a better-equipped facility.
Both of us had private health insurance, which we'd never used, so we thought we'd give it a go.
The out-of-pocket costs for the private hospital were estimated in advance at $500, which turned out to be accurate in the end.
We shopped around for a recommended obstetrician and settled on someone in the CBD who charged $4000, which we thought would be for the delivery, no matter the outcome.
Of that amount, we had to pay $1800 after Medicare.
We heard of prices for obstetricians as low as $3000 in Sydney's west and as high as $6400 on the north shore.
Our doctor also charged us $100 for every visit to his office, of which we received about $80 back on each bill from Medicare.
So far, we're in for about $2800, which we thought was about the maximum we wanted to pay in a country that rates its public health care system among the best in the world.
Well, things went a bit pear-shaped during labour and we ended up in the operating theatre - no helicopter required.
If I had known what was to come I would have scrubbed up myself for the procedure.
The first anaesthetist charged $700 to stick a needle in my wife for the epidural - a 10-minute procedure.
The second anaesthetist, who was present during the surgery, charged an additional $1386 and did almost nothing.
During my wife's procedure, a young nurse present made it clear she was there to take photos and asked if I had a camera with me. I did.
The assisting surgeon charged another $420 and to top things off, our obstetrician sent us a bill for another $1539.
Last but certainly not least, a paediatrician making daily rounds at the hospital checked out our son on three separate occasions for less than five minutes a visit.
The cost for that? $700.
Incidentally, we pay $266 a month as a family for private health insurance.
My experience doesn't stop there. The last time I went to the dentist, also in the CBD, I was slapped with a bill for teeth cleaning of $205. My dentist and I are still negotiating.
An ear, nose and throat specialist recently hit me with a $170 bill for a 10-minute appointment, which garnered a $68 reimbursement from Medicare.
All of these experiences brought to mind the controversy over the federal government's ceiling insulation rebate scheme.
Every man and his dog signed up as an insulation installer to extract easy money from the government.
A neighbour in our unit block suddenly turned his garage into a storage facility for insulation batts. He could barely shut the door, they were packed so tight.
Hard to believe our touted public hospital system pushed my wife and I towards the private system, which, in the end, left an indelible linkage in our minds to the federal government's biggest fiasco to date.
