25 Jul 2018 BPC Action to Congress: Bipartisan Health Reform is Possible, Based on Common Principles in Health
BPC Action applauds the five Principles of Common Understanding released by the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Expert Panel on the Future of Health Care, which includes former Senate Majority Leaders Tom Daschle and Bill Frist, as well as leading health policy experts representing diverse political viewpoints. These common elements provide a bipartisan blueprint for both parties to come together to create a politically viable and policy sound plan that addresses our health care challenges. The five principles are:
- All individuals should have meaningful and affordable public or private health insurance. These benefits should be evidence-based and avoid poorly designed financial incentives, in addition to adequately subsidizing low-and-moderate-income households.
- Health reform should be designed to avoid major disruption because many patients rely on today’s long-standing arrangements to get needed care. The reform should expand coverage and provide incentives for existing systems to align better, be more efficient, and improve quality.
- Insurance markets should be stable, not endangered by premium-increases due to adverse selection or insufficient pooling of risks. Reform proposals should encourage broad-based participation in private insurance markets to ensure pre-existing condition protections and market stability and affordability.
- Health reform should reduce excessive and unnecessary health care cost growth. Policies should be designed to provide more effective competition among insurers and medical services providers while promoting more and clearer choices, encouraging payment reforms that improve and deliver more efficient care, and encouraging preventive interventions that improve health status.
- Reform policies must be politically and financially sustainable over the long-term. Developing and securing bipartisan agreements in these areas will ensure greater stability and certainty for patients, employers, providers, and governments while producing policies that can be sustained over many years and election cycles.
We urge policymakers to look to these principles as a basis for working together improve the quality, affordability, and sustainability of health care for individuals, families, and our country as a whole.
