Health Care Organizations Send Follow-Up Letter to White House Regarding Cost Savings

Six health care organizations – AHIP, AdvaMed, SEIU, AHA, AMA, and PhRMA – submitted a letter to the White House as a follow-up to the commitment the organizations made last month to help achieve the Administration’s goal of reducing by 1.5% the annual health expenditure growth rate, which would save an estimated $2 trillion over the next 10 years. 

Broadly speaking, the latest letter and the accompanying documents reflect each sector’s cost-cutting commitments in the following key areas:

• Utilization of care: Providing clinicians and other providers with the tools to address utilization and to improve quality and safety will help ensure that patients receive the right care at the right time in the right setting and will lower costs.
• Cost of doing business: Innovative approaches to reducing the growing costs of providing health care services are essential and will benefit all stakeholders in the health care system.
• Administrative simplification: Streamlining the claims processing system will allow clinicians and other personnel to spend less time and fewer resources on paperwork, lowering costs for everyone.
• Chronic care: Identifying significant opportunities to better manage chronic disease, which accounts for 75% of overall health care spending. Also looking at more effective approaches to health promotion and disease prevention, with a special focus on obesity.