Making Health Care Affordable: Reining In Health Industry Abuses To Lower People’s Costs and Generate Budget Savings

After a national election that focused on affordability, Families USA’s new affordability agenda outlines a list of concrete and actionable policy recommendations that would result in lower health care costs and generate hundreds of billions of dollars in savings for a nation that spends more than $3 trillion every year on health care. These well-vetted, commonsense and bipartisan reforms take aim directly at the health care affordability crisis to provide relief for families.

The policy recommendations are broken down into the following four categories, and highlights from each category and the potential savings generated by the policy are included below:

• Promote meaningful transparency and accountability
  • Strengthen hospital and health plan price transparency by requiring all hospitals and health plans to disclose their negotiated rates in dollars and cents.
  • Advance dishonest billing reforms to ensure that big hospital corporations are not overcharging in outpatient settings, saving an estimated $403 million over ten years.
• Reduce waste and inefficiencies driven by corporate health systems
  • Enact a comprehensive same service, same price policy to stop big hospital corporations from charging more for the same care, and shifting patients to higher-cost care settings, saving an estimated $157 billion over ten years.
  • Strengthen the Medicare Advantage payment system against health care industry gaming to promote competition, saving an estimated $772 billion to $2.3 trillion over 10 years.
• Root out conflicts of interest that increase health care costs
  • Prohibit anti-competitive contracting including between providers and insurers that limit patients’ access to alternative sources of health care, which is estimated to save as much as $194 billion over ten years.
• Provide direct relief to working families and patients
  • Lower the cost of prescription drugs by continuing to allow Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices, saving as much as $255 billion over the next ten years.
  • Extend advanced premium tax credits to ensure millions of working Americans and their families maintain access to affordable health care coverage.

Several of the policies included in the agenda including price and billing transparency and site-neutral payments for drug administration services passed the House of Representatives in 2023 with overwhelming bipartisan support as part of the Lower Costs, More Transparency Act but were ultimately left out of the final government funding package in late 2024.

View the full policy agenda at the link below.