In a blow to President Obama’s health care law, Aetna, one of the nation’s major insurers, said Monday that it would sharply reduce its participation in the law’s public marketplaces next year.

All five members of the Wadstein family have Covered California’s most comprehensive — and expensive — level of health insurance, even though the two youngest children are the only ones who need that kind of plan.

At a time when health care spending seems only to go up, an initiative in California has slashed the prices of many common procedures.

You have your red pill and your green pill. There’s the one you take at breakfast, the one you take before bed and the one you have to take six hours after eating.

In November, after a bad fall, 85-year-old Elizabeth Cannon was taken to a hospital outside Philadelphia for six and a half days of “observation,” followed by nearly five months at a nearby nursing home for rehabilitation and skilled nursing care. The cost: more than $40,000.

The region's average penalty was just over one-half of 1 percent of total Medicare reimbursements; last year it was one-third of 1 percent. Still, that's lower than the national average, says Jordan Rau, a Kaiser Health News journalist who interpreted the annual Medicare data.