Toward a 21st-Century Health Care System
This article presents eight recommendations to improve quality and lower costs of the U.S. health care system. The recommendations were created by the FRESH-thinking project, a series of workshops attended by physicians, health insurance executives, business leaders, economists, health policy experts, and hospital administrators.
Recommendations:
- Replace the current payment system with one that rewards efficient delivery of health care and that bases payment on measured outcomes.
- Establish an independent agency to assess the comparative effectiveness of drugs and medical treatments.
- Simplify health care laws and regulations at the federal and state level to promote innovation, streamline administration and support coordination.
- Create a national, interoperable technology infrastructure.
- Develop a national health database with participation from all owners of health care data.
- Identify revenue sources, including a cap on the tax exemption for employer-sponsored insurance, to expand health care coverage to all Americans.
- Develop regional insurance exchanges to pool risk and provide standard benefit packages to all Americans without employer-based health insurance.
- Monitor the regional exchanges with a board of stakeholders to determine and update the standard benefit package offered by the exchanges.