While Congress tries to provide affordable health care to everyone, the system they're working to overhaul continues to inflict anxiety, frustration, and a feeling of helplessness on the people already suffering from disease.

"My father was in the hospital," said David Cox, "and he got charged ten or twelve dollars for two aspirins. And that just tells you right there it's all blown out of proportion."

Cox is the manager of Red's Coach and Table, a Bowling Green restaurant his father started decades ago.

And after all those years of work, and all those payments to health insurance, David is concerned about who's going to have to pay for health care reform.

"If you're askin' the small businesses to fork the bill, as they say, for this health care," Cox said, "they're not gonna be able to do it, and you're gonna have more small business goin' out of business if they're made to do it."

Costs have gotten so high, David had to drop his own health insurance.

"Y'know you can't pay your premium," he said. "You just can't have health insurance, y'know, so currently I can't afford the health insurance, so I don't have it. I'm just sort of rollin' the dice and seein' if, y'know, hopin' I can make it through til I can afford it again."

And he hopes Congress attacks health care one segment at a time, whether it's insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, or doctors.

"You're goin' against too many lobbyists from different organizations," Cox said, "and you're goin' after 'em all at once y'know. Whereas if you attack maybe one at a time, you'd come out with a better situation."

Doctor Timothy Hulsey is a plastic surgeon in Bowling Green. He agrees Congress should take one segment of health care at a time, helping those uninsured with the most need first.

"Then for what needs to be done as far as dealing with insurance companies and their egregious, at times, tactics, of not covering and actually dictating care and so forth," Dr. Hulsey said, "that's something that may take a little longer to dictate."

And he thinks the government could do a better job of spending our money.

"Y'know if we want to talk about fraud and things in health care and Medicare, let's look at fraud in government. Let's say we don't need this amount of money to pay for toilet seats and hammers at several hundred dollars apiece. This needs to be spent on taking care of people who cannot cover themselves with insurance."

But ultimately he knows the price is going to have to be paid by all of us.

"Whether that's in taxes, higher premiums to their insurance companies, more that they pay out of their pocket to the hospitals and the doctors, and so forth, he said. "It is a matter of fact that the 'haves' will pay for the 'have nots.' And I think we all have to absorb a little bit of that as a society, to try to take care of, again, those people that really need that care that can't get it."

Doctor Hulsey also feels Congress should not try to fix the entire multi-trillion dollar-a-year health care system in a matter of months, when he says it took them two years just to craft a Medicaid bill.

And David Cox says he favors allowing insurance companies to cross state lines to offer health care coverage at more competitive rates.

And what about the public option? Former Senator John Breaux of Louisiana was chairman of the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare.

He told me he'd prefer it wasn't necessary, but says Congress could use the public option as a lever to require insurance companies to cover everyone, and not cancel policies arbitrarily.

"If they don't perform," said Senator Breaux, "then you have a public option perhaps as a fallback, or as a trigger that would come into play, if the private sector doesn't do what I think members of Congress would like to see done. It's exactly what we did in prescription drugs, and the private sector did deliver, and the public option never had to come into play, and seniors are very happy with the product."

What's the cure? No one knows yet.

But every one of us ill be impacted by health care reform, and we can all have input to the action Congress takes.

To tell your senator or congressman what you want done about it, click here, to go to a list of their web sites and phone numbers.