Common Ground and Cost Containment

In 1993, when the last effort to enact comprehensive health reform was undertaken, health care expenditures were about $900 billion a year. In 2007, healthcare expenditures were nearly $2.2 trillion. While our organizations may not agree on every issue, we consistently agree that the current growth in healthcare expenditures is unsustainable.

Understanding that cost-containment is critical to achieving meaningful and sustainable healthcare reform, we are united in identifying ways to ensure that cost and coverage are done in unison. Additionally, doing so will save lives, improve the safety and delivery of care, and have the potential to help fuel our economic recovery.

While we each have our own organizational priorities in health care reform, there is broad agreement among the four lead organizations in Divided We Fail that cost-containment should include:

• Taking significant steps to refocus payment incentives to reward quality rather than quantity of care, through expanded efforts to implement pay-for-performance systems that can help keep coverage more affordable;
• Strengthening primary care and chronic care management which are proven ways to promote quality, cost-effective care by providing more accurate payment and expanded testing of the "medical home" model that holds great promise for improving quality, coordination and efficiency;
• Promoting health information technology, decision support tools, and unbiased research on the effectiveness of all aspects of our health care system to give doctors the best information available to make health care decisions with their patients; and
• Promoting provider collaboration and accountability by rewarding, rather than penalizing, collaboration across care settings to provide patient-centered care to improve both quality and efficiency and keep coverage affordable.

In these challenging economic times, it is more critical than ever to identify solutions to the health care crisis that make the best use of our limited resources. As the leading coalition dedicated to spurring bipartisan consensus toward reform, we strongly believe that health care solutions must make health care coverage more affordable and accessible for individuals, businesses and society. Clearly, achieving this goal begins with taking steps to reign in the growth of costs across the healthcare system.

Divided We Fail allies will continue to work diligently together to find workable solutions because we all understand that the status quo is unsustainable and we cannot afford to fail. We look forward to working with Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle to make enactment of meaningful, comprehensive health reform a reality this year.