WASHINGTON DC (October 29, 2019) — The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and the West Health Policy Center have launched the Health-Savers Initiative, a collaborative-research project to develop bold policy-solutions to lower health-care costs.
The project will focus on making health-care more affordable across all payers, including patients, employers, states, and the federal government. It will produce detailed specifications for each policy-option along with estimates of fiscal-impacts for affected stakeholders.
“The high cost of health-care threatens the financial security and well-being of all Americans, but it doesn’t have to be that way,” said Timothy A Lash, president of the West Health Policy Center. “Our effort will get to the root cause of skyrocketing health-care costs and identify realistic solutions policymakers can deploy to get serious about solutions.”
“Health-care is the single largest part of the federal budget, and its rapid growth is a key driver of our rising national debt,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “It’s time for both sides to move beyond their talking points and start working together on evidence-based reforms to improve the value and cost-effectiveness of our current system. The right types of policy-changes will make health-care more affordable for everyone; that includes the federal government.”
Holly Harvey, director of health policy at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, and Cristina Boccuti, director of health policy at the West Health Policy Center, will lead the project.
For more information, please contact Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget press secretary Patrick Newton at newton@crfb.org or West Health Policy Center director of public affairs Sofia Kosmetatos at skosmetatos@westhealth.org.
