Analyses

Behind the Cost of Care: An Analysis of High and Irrational California Health Care Prices

Families across California are grappling with the devastating effects of high health care costs. Over half of all Californians have had to skip or postpone needed health care services due to the cost ...

Meeting Consumers Deepest Health Care Needs: A Call for True Payment Reform

Consumers across the United States are grappling with a health care system that is failing to meet their needs. Health care is expensive, inaccessible, and often low-quality, resulting in poorer healt...

California’s Office of Health Care Affordability: An Opportunity to Realize True Affordability

California is facing a health care affordability crisis resulting in some of the highest and most varying health care costs in the country. Behind the state’s extreme health care unaffordability are...

Gaming the System: How Hospitals Are Driving Up Health Care Costs by Abusing Site of Service

Health care providers should be reimbursed at a level that supports the most efficient, highest quality care irrespective of the location in which it is provided – this is a foundational principle i...

Congressional Proposals to Cut Medicaid Would Harm Hardworking Families Relying on Key Services and Put Disabled People in Particular at Risk

*Medicaid cuts threaten coverage for millions of our nation’s children and families* Despite Medicaid’s clear importance and popularity, some congressional leaders are threatening to cut Medicaid...

Advocacy Resource: Ensuring the Medicare Drug Negotiation Program Prioritizes Families and Consumers

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA) was a critical moment in the effort to achieve lower and more affordable drug costs. Most notably, the IRA finally gave Medicare the authority to negotiate pr...

With Impending Funding Crises, Rural Hospitals Need a Medicaid Expansion Lifeboat to Stay Afloat

Two hundred rural hospitals are at immediate risk of closing, and another 600 rural facilities are at high risk of closing in the future. The end of emergency COVID-19 hospital funding, together with ...

Focus on Affordability: How States Can Build on the Inflation Reduction Act to Lower Prescription Drug Costs

For decades, Americans have endured the skyrocketing costs of prescription drugs. In August, Congress finally took action to address this problem by passing the Inflation Reduction Act. This historic ...

Bleeding Americans Dry: The Role of Big Hospital Corporations in Driving our Nation’s Health Care Affordability and Quality Crisis

This is the second resource in Families USA's People First Care Initiative. The major strategy in hospitals' current business model is to generate profit by buying up other hospitals and doctor's o...

Our Health Care System Has Lost Its Way

This is the first resource in Families USA's People First Care initiative. There are two principal financial drivers of unaffordable, inequitable health care and poor health for the American people...