Advancing a Bipartisan Plan for Health Care Reform:
Technical Support for the Bipartisan Policy Center Leaders' Project Read the Introduction and Summary of Key Recommendations» Read the Full Report, "Crossing Our Lines: Working Together to Reform the U.S. Health System"» Crossing Our Lines: Working Together to Reform the U.S. Health System
The bipartisan framework released by former U.S. Senate Majority Leaders Howard Baker, Tom Daschle and Bob Dole, members of the Bipartisan Policy Center’s (BPC) Advisory Board, provides recommendations for comprehensive health reform to ensure that every American has affordable, quality health coverage. The report is a product of the BPC’s Leaders’ Project on the State of American Health Care, which was launched last year and is co-directed by health care policy experts Chris Jennings and Mark McClellan.
The Leaders’ proposal presents key findings from their sustained effort to develop consensus on bipartisan policy recommendations for health care reform. Their goal was to develop a comprehensive but achievable set of policies to ensure that all Americans have quality, affordable health insurance coverage, while constraining cost growth, promoting innovative delivery of care and focusing treatments more on the patient – and not just the illness. Together, these changes are necessary to achieve a much higher return on our health care spending, which now exceeds $2 trillion per year.
To support the development of the proposal, the Leaders sought advice and input from a broad range of health care providers, businesses, labor representatives, state and local policymakers, health plans, academics, and consumer advocates through a series of public policy forums and targeted outreach activities. Ultimately, the effort seeks to establish a constructive center in the often polarized debate about health reform, and to advance a coherent strategy for modernizing the health care system.
Significant Input from the Engelberg Center The Leaders also relied on expert guidance and technical assistance from Engelberg Center leadership and staff in developing the bipartisan recommendations. In particular, the Center’s Aaron McKethan and Mark Shepard led the technical support effort, in collaboration with Jonathan Gruber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Aligned in Support of Real Health Care Reform The Engelberg Center’s role in advancing health care reform efforts goes beyond its technical support for the comprehensive recommendations. The Center’s work is focused on a range of priorities and projects that will help advance the Leaders’ four “pillars” of health reform: quality and value; available, meaningful, and affordable health insurance; personal responsibility and healthy choices; and a workable, sustainable approach to health care financing.
Through its efforts across these pillars, the Center will continue to inform the health care debate and provide data-driven, practical policy solutions to aid in reform efforts that will improve quality and transform the system to one based on higher value. Activities underway at the Center are addressing such challenges as meaningful payment and delivery reform that rewards providers for improving quality and bending the cost curve, effective implementation of health information technology, use of evidence to inform decisions of providers and patients alike, and development of a nationwide infrastructure for measuring and reporting on quality and costs.
Learn more about the
Engelberg Center’s priorities or the
BPC's Leaders' Project on the State of American Health Care.