This week, President Bush offered tax deductions for individuals buying health care insurance. Who does this help? Lisa Napoli does the math.

KAI RYSSDAL: There was lots of coverage this week of the president's State of the Union address. We thought today we'd zero in on one slice of what he offered up--health care. You've probably heard by now that Mr. Bush wants to change the way health benefits are taxed. The president says that ultimately it'll help more Americans afford insurance. We asked Marketplace's Lisa NAPOLI: to look into who'll actually, well, benefit.

LISA NAPOLI: Michael Saltzman knows he's a lucky guy. He not only works for himself, he's able to pay for health insurance for his family. We sat down at the Starbucks near his office to talk about it. And how much does it cost you?

MICHAEL SALTZMAN: It costs us approximately $550 a month, but that's really with a very high deductible.

NAPOLI: And has it gotten more expensive, I would imagine, over the last five years?

MICHAEL SALTZMAN: Yeah, and we've done two things. We've cut back on the deductible. It just gets higher and higher so it really doesn't pay for any out of pocket. And it just gets more expensive every year. So we're screwed both ways...

NAPOLI: Now it may be that this whole story is moot anyway since most people don't expect the president's plan will fly in its current form. Peter Harbage of the New America Foundation is one of them.

PETER HARBAGE: You know health care is very complicated. It can be very polarizing as Senator Clinton found out when she was First Lady in 1993. These are very difficult issues with a lot of money at stake.

NAPOLI: Harbage says for the president's plan to work, it needs to get at the complexity of what's causing health care costs to rise. But he admits doing that isn't going to be easy.

HARBAGE: It's taken us 40 years to, you know, develop the broken system that we have now and no one's going to be able to fix it overnight...

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