Whitehouse, Cassidy Urge Azar to Focus on Reforming How Americans Pay for Health Care

Press Release

Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Bill Cassidy, M.D. (R-LA), have requested a bipartisan dialogue with Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar on continuing progress in reforming the way Americans pay for and are delivered health care. Even after improvements in recent years, America remains by far the most expensive health care system in the world, the Senators note in a joint letter. Whitehouse and Cassidy call on Azar to ensure that the U.S. health care system continues to improve care quality and curb escalating health care costs, and does not backslide on the headway Medicare, private payers, and states have made implementing new payment models.

"At your nomination hearing in the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, you said "[Medicare] is the only payer that sits there with enough concentration of lives to change the system.' We agree," the Senators write. "As the largest purchaser of health care in the United States, the federal government needs to send a strong signal that paying for volume via fee-for-service is not the direction in which our health care system is headed. Any real or perceived absence of federal leadership will slow private-sector momentum toward alternative payment models."

Although the pace of health care spending has slowed in recent years, Americans still spend more on health care than anyone else in the world. Total U.S. health care spending reached $3.3 trillion in 2016 or $10,348 per person, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. According to data compiled by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the U.S. spends more than $2,200 more per capita on health care than the next most expensive country in the world, despite falling in the middle of the pack among its international peers on key health indicators like infant mortality.

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