With members of Congress divided over many of the nation’s health care issues, Americans agree that the top health care priority should be lowering costs, according to U.S. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) in his May 29 white paper, Ideas to Make Health Care Affordable Again.
“Americans know the status quo is unacceptable. They want solutions,” writes the senator, who is a licensed medical doctor and a member of the U.S. Senate health and finance committees.
The United States in 2016 spent $3.3 trillion on health care, or 17.9 percent of gross domestic product, which was almost twice as much, as a percentage of its economy, as other developed countries, according to the paper, despite the fact that Americans used roughly the same amount of health care as did the citizens of other wealthy countries.
“Families and patients have seen their health insurance premiums and the cost of care go up year after year. It’s unaffordable and unsustainable, and things aren’t going to get better until we change our broken system,” Sen. Cassidy said on May 29 when he released the white paper.
“I’m focused on lowering health care costs because we have to make health care affordable again,” he said. “That’s what these ideas I’m outlining are intended to do.”
Some of Sen. Cassidy’s overarching ideas covered in the report for making health care affordable include empowering patients to reduce their own health costs; lowering health insurance premiums and patients’ drug costs; ending industry monopolies by increasing competition; and decreasing costs through primary care, prevention and chronic disease management.
And according to a summary provided by the senator’s staff, some of his new proposals to accomplish those goals include: implementing price transparency so patients know prices; allowing greater use of free-standing emergency centers, ambulatory surgery centers, physician-owned hospitals, and emergency rural centers for less severe conditions; and increasing the use of cost-benefit analysis for U.S. drug approvals.
Furthermore, he calls for providing states with incentives to encourage young people to enter the individual market and allowing states to determine when an insurer is banned from re-entering the state’s individual market. Cassidy also proposes analyzing consolidation in health care by industry and geographic area, and examining the social determinants of health and the racial disparities that exist within the current system.
“The good news is that it’s absolutely possible to fix this mess by ending the rules that rig the system for the companies with all the lawyers and lobbyists, and giving patients the power to choose what is best for them,” Sen. Cassidy said.
The bad news, however, is that the U.S. Senate remains split on health care while Washington, D.C., Democrats refuse to work with Republicans to improve the situation, he added, pointing to previously agreed upon bipartisan initiatives that ultimately fell apart.
“Why did they do this? Election-year politics, plain and simple,” said the senator.
Nevertheless, just because the Senate doesn’t have the votes right now to pass national legislation doesn’t mean federal lawmakers should stop developing ideas to address the country’s health care problems, said Sen. Cassidy.
“I hope the eight pages of ideas I’m publishing today will further our ongoing discussions and debates, and eventually translate into good legislation we can introduce and send to the president’s desk,” he said. “Americans deserve a better health care system and lower health care costs, and I will work with anyone who is willing to help me achieve that goal.”