On November 11 and 12, 2013, Consumers Union and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation convened a working meeting for consumer advocates on the topic, “Addressing Rising Health Care Costs.”
The resulting report is intended to provide a road map of the key concepts and research findings that may help advocates work on this important policy issue. This report is not meant to be exhaustive but is designed to serve as a starting point and a means of facilitating the conversation around health care costs.
The focus of this report is identifying the major factors contributing to systemic increases in health care costs. The accumulated evidence on health care cost drivers and strategies is massive yet, at the same time, incomplete. This report is meant to be a solid beginning point, but by no means an end point for exploring this topic.