A comprehensive set of insurance, payment, and system reforms could guarantee affordable health insurance coverage, improve health outcomes, and slow the growth of health spending by $3 trillion by the end of the next decade, according to a new report by the Commonwealth Fund Commission on a High Performance Health System.
The report, The Path to a High Performance U.S. Health System: A 2020 Vision and the Policies to Pave the Way, lays out strategic reforms that simultaneously aim to improve access, enhance quality, and control costs. A central recommendation is to create a national insurance exchange that would offer a choice of private plans and a new public plan, coupled with insurance reforms that would make coverage affordable, ensure access, and lower administrative costs. The report’s analysis indicates that insurance reforms would extend coverage to everyone within two years, with only 1 percent uninsured throughout the next decade.
If combined with payment and system reforms initiated in 2010, the integrated approach to reform could slow the growth of national health spending by a cumulative $3 trillion by 2020. Spending would still go up, but at a slower rate.
Read the report.
