What can we do to better health insurance?

Build better health insurance?

After the Workers Compensation Audit, we can say.

The four of us came together to change the conversation about how health care can be improved and cost growth restricted. What we have learned is that our nation will continue to face a problem with health-care costs until better care is prioritized over more care. The good news is that, through thoughtful policy, health-care practitioners can be encouraged through rewards to focus far more on what is best for their patients and less on the number of tests and procedures they can order. The even better news is that such a health-care vision can not only produce better care but also cost less.

With the Bipartisan Policy Center, we will release a report on Thursday with over 50 recommendations to achieve the critical goal of improving the quality and affordability of care for all Americans with high and rising health care expenditure. This report is the culmination of almost a year of work to quantify the impact of our proposed policies, including stakeholder outreach, thorough research and substantive analytics.

Too often we talk about health care in Washington as if it's just a line item on a budget table. Those of us who have experienced the best of health care know that in this most personal of issues, it is not how care should be delivered or policy made. Our country can achieve a higher-value health care system— meaning higher quality as well as greater efficiency.

Cost drivers for health care are complex and interwoven, but the most problematic are the inefficiencies, misaligned incentives and fragmented care delivery in the current fee-for-service system. To address these, we are seeking to promote coordinated and accountable health care delivery and payment systems, building on what has been proven successful in both the private and public sectors. Organized care systems emphasize the value of care given over the care volume. Often, these systems are better able to meet the needs and desires of patients and are able to effectively reimburse providers and practitioners for quality care.

We sought to avoid simple cost-shifting in all of our proposals as a means of generating federal budgetary savings, rather than promoting transparency and protecting patient choice. We have also focused on reforms that will stimulate transformation throughout the health care system, not just Medicare. However, we believe that Medicare's power can be leveraged to lead the way in U.S. health care transformation.

In brief, our recommendations:

• Preserve traditional Medicare's promise while adding more recipient choices and protections, including accountable care systems and a stronger, more competitive Medicare Advantage program.
• Strengthen and modernize the traditional benefit of Medicare, including adding a catastrophic cap, streamlining cost-sharing and premiums, and expanding access to low-income assistance programs.
• Reform health insurance tax treatment to limit excessively expensive insurance products ' tax-favored treatment.
• Empower patients and streamline quality reporting by promoting transparency that is meaningful to consumers, families, and businesses.
• Advance the nation's understanding of potential cost savings from prevention programs by supporting effective strategies for research and innovation to address costly chronic conditions.
• Provide incentives for states to promote policies that will support a more organized, value-driven delivery and payment system for health care, such as supporting reform of medical liability and strengthening their primary care workforce.

All of these policies are aimed at improving the quality and value of health care for our nation. That's where every effort to reform health should begin. The savings we achieved — debt and deficit reduction of $ 560 billion over 10 years — is the outcome of our work, not the goal.