Meeting the Health Care Affordability Problem with Policy Solutions
Health care costs and affordability remain top of mind in 2024. The rising cost of health care has outpaced wage growth, placing increasing financial pressure on individuals, families, and employers, and crowding out investment in other public services.
Over the past decade, health care spending in the private market has grown faster than spending by Medicare and Medicaid. This trend is expected to continue and requires we turn our attention toward slowing the rate of spending growth and making health care more affordable for all Americans.
That’s where we come in. One of the Commonwealth Fund’s key objectives is to support the development of research that not only tracks the growth in health costs and spending and its burdensome impact on individuals and families, but to seek and share solutions to the problem. See below for three examples of the types of solutions we’ve proposed in the past year. If they read like something you would find useful, use one of the email signup forms on this page to subscribe to our mailings.
Potential Solutions to Improving the Affordability of Health Care in the U.S.
Permanently extend enhanced marketplace premium subsidies set to expire in 2025.
These larger subsidies led to record enrollment in marketplace plans. Congress could make these subsidies permanent to keep people enrolled in coverage and to encourage new enrollment.
Lower health care cost growth
Federal and state policymakers could take steps to address the high health care prices that are driving up commercial insurance premiums and deductibles, such as by creating new public plan options.
Lower deductibles and out-of-pocket costs in marketplace plans.
Congress could extend cost-sharing reduction subsidies to middle-income people and change the benchmark plan in the Affordable Care Act marketplaces from silver to gold, which offers better financial protection.
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Recent publications exploring the health care affordability crisis and solutions to ease the burden.
Medicare’s Affordability Problem: A Look at the Cost Burdens Faced by Older Enrollees
Using data from the Fund's most recent Biennial Health Insurance Survey, researchers examined the financial impact of health care for people 65 and older with Medicare and how that varies by type of Medicare coverage — traditional versus Medicare Advantage — and by income level.
State Protections Against Medical Debt: A Look at Policies Across the U.S.
Here, researchers examine the web of laws and regulations designed to protect patients from medical debt and find that many states have acted to fill gaps in what are generally lax — and often unenforced — federal standards.
