The dry eyeballs. The creaky hips. Our skin, yielded to those early decades of abuse. The pains and aches of ageing, even though, in the big scheme of things, we are not even two-thirds there.

I swore I would never be one of those people, yet here I am. And as we talk about our bodies falling apart, we also talk about money, how to pay for upkeep - those endless trips to the physio, the colonoscopies, multifocals, the fancy treatments to get rid of various skin cancers don't pay for themselves.

And neither does our vastly expensive private health insurance. Last year, with gaps, I spent $15,000 to get two grand back. That includes the the premium and the $10,000 worth of gaps between what the insurer pays and what the health professionals charge.

Health honcho of the Grattan Institute Stephen Duckett reminds me paying for insurance saves me the Medicare levy surcharge. And also reminds me that we'd all be much better off if we saved the money we spent on insurance. But no-one does that.

Of course, it is not just health insurance that is the problem. Trying to get a realistic cost estimate from the health professional you are actually dealing with is tough enough but try getting quotes on a colonoscopy from a doctor you've heard is good. The only way to shop around is to get a referral to every single doctor and then make your choice. That's a very expensive way to look after your health.

What we spend on our health is a matrix of Medicare levies, private health insurance, unregulated doctors' fees and unpredictable gaps across an entire industry which obscures its fees and resists transparency.

At the beginning of this month, my health insurance rose by 3 per cent. Not much really, except that I don't get value for money. And late last year, I rang my health insurer to bargain. I also asked permission to record the call. I recommend this practice of mine. House insurance. Contents insurance. Car insurance. Interest rate on mortgage. Over the years, it's saved me quite a bit of money. It's good to have a recording of the conversation since the institutional memory of what happened is often different to mine.

On the phone to the insurer, I explained my child-bearing years were over and wanted cover which was more appropriate to my stage of life, the stage of life where your both your teeth and your eyes crumble. It was impossible to get what I wanted. It was also impossible to compare and contrast with any other health insurer to get a better deal. The way she explained it to me, I had to keep baby cover if I wanted top cover for either hospital or ancillaries. I rang NIB media to check the consultant wasn't confused. The first response when I rang them? That isn't right. An hour later, they confirmed. If you want top cover for everything, you must also pay for things you know you will never need again.

Duckett says that in 1969, the then Liberal government commissioned an inquiry into private health insurance which found it to be unnecessarily complex. Nothing has changed except that the deal for consumers is worse than it's ever been.

Insurers need it to be complex because that complexity keeps customers loyal, or if not loyal, then bound to the contract they are already in because anything else takes time we don't have. Latrobe University's Karen Willis, who's spent an inordinate amount of time researching health insurance, says we agonise about this kind of insurance in a way that we don't about cars or houses or travel. But as she points out, people want to be sure they will be covered for whatever ails them and they can never actually be sure. Also, says Willis, lots of us use Medicare even when we have private health insurance, just to be on the safe side because we fear the gaps will be more than we can handle. Her research says insurance is as much about peace of mind, the idea you can get in to see someone without a wait, as it is about the money.

Which is a good thing really, since James Cook University's Emily Callander reveals, terrifyingly, that in the highly privatised childbirth industry, the gaps are bigger than ever. Since 1993, out-of-pocket charges associated with out-of-hospital obstetric care have risen more than 1000 per cent and that's adjusted for inflation. Avoiding these costs is near impossible. As Callander says, "There is no way for consumers to make informed judgments."

Next year, that might change, at least for health insurance, with the introduction of what the government describes as "easily understood categories of cover", gold, silver and bronze.

Doctors and dentists next. Then we will have to spend the entire night talking about the one other dinner conversation staple.

Jenna Price is a Fairfax columnist and an academic at the University of Technology Sydney.