The best solution was (for me anyway) to treat insurance as insurance instead of a health care plan, and take advantage of all the tax breaks I could for doing

The best solution was (for me anyway) to treat insurance as insurance instead of a health care plan, and take advantage of all the tax breaks I could for doing so. I put my family on a $10k deductible plan, primarily to cover catastrophes. This gave me two things: negotiated rates for health services (typically a 40-60% discount) and eligibility for an HSA. The plan ran us $190/mo. Now, $10k is kind of a scary number for something like that, but I felt comfortable with it given that we'd never have to write a $10k check. At the very worst we'd rack up a $10k debt to a hospital or something, which (given the current state of healthcare) we could reasonably expect to pay off over like 15 - 20years. It seemed reasonable to me, for what we needed. The HSA is helpful because it's effectively another IRA you can use for pretty much any medical expense. So for normal health care, we ended up paying about 40% of the "list" costs for things, and pre-tax. Doing this requires that you be a little aggressive about getting good deals on care, though. My daughter broke her arm about three months in to this, so we took her to a minor emergency clinic. I told them what was up and they "coded" the visit at a much lower rate than it would have been. The next day, we actually called around to find out what people were going to charge us for a real cast to replace the splint the clinic put on. It worked out to be about $600 total, including the minor emergency clinic visit. So in summary: get coverage for catastrophic health events with a "cheap" plan, abuse the negotiated rates that plan gets you, get an HSA, and be an intelligent consumer of health care. Oh, and minor emergency clinics are your friend.