Health Reform 2.0: A Call to Action

What’s the next frontier in health reform?

Both a call to action and a roadmap for progress, Families USA’s latest report, Health Reform 2.0 lays out a path for securing high-quality, affordable health care to all Americans—regardless of income, age, race, or ethnicity—and for achieving the “Triple Aim”: improving health, enhancing quality of care, and reducing health care costs.

Why Health Reform 2.0?

With the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, every legal resident gained the right to health coverage—a historic achievement. However, enacting this unprecedented legal right is not the same as making it a living reality. We must also ensure that health coverage and care become concrete realities for everyone. In proposing Health Reform 2.0, Families USA hopes to gain the active support of health care advocates and policy makers who will vigorously pursue this agenda in the years ahead.

In Health Reform 2.0, we identify the steps necessary to transform America’s health care system to ensure that all Americans are able to get the high-quality care they need, when they need it, at an affordable price.

Addressing disparities in health (health equity)

Because achieving true health equity is integral to health reform, we also address how the health care system can work to eliminate the disparities in health care that plague our most vulnerable communities, and how to ensure that the care these communities receive is language-accessible and culturally competent.

Health Reform 2.0 outlines four goals for health system reform:

• Securing health coverage for all: expanding Medicaid in all states, strengthening children’s coverage by extending CHIP funding and improving private insurance, and making it easier for people to enroll in and renew coverage
• Ensuring that health coverage means access to needed care: creating a more equitable distribution of providers, ensuring that provider networks deliver meaningful access to care, and making dental coverage universally available
• Transforming our health care system to provide care that is appropriate, high-quality, equitable, and patient-centered: paying for quality—not quantity—of care, ensuring coordination of care, and fostering evidence-based care
• Reducing health care costs and making care more affordable: stopping uncompetitive provider consolidations, reducing high prescription drug costs, and making information on health care cost and quality transparent