An Opportunity to Thoughtfully and Holistically Address Health Care Spending

The Medicare Trustees Annual Report issued last week was a mix of positive news and a stark reminder that we need to find thoughtful solutions to ensure that the Medicare program will remain solvent for a long time to come.

First, the good news: national spending on health care has grown more slowly than projected and, consequently, the Medicare Trust Fund will remain solvent one year longer (2029) than the Trustees had predicted in 2016. Since growth in spending was not found to be accelerating, the Trustees did not need to trigger the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB), a group that would make immediate and consequential cuts to benefits and services in Medicare. This outcome would not be in the best interests of older and disabled Americans – or even the program’s long-term sustainability.

Although the Report provided another year of breathing room before triggering IPAB, this additional time should be used to find solutions to not only address Medicare‘s solvency, but our overall health system spending growth as well. This involves considering where potential reforms or policies could generate quality improvements, cost-effectiveness and innovations across the health care system that benefit our nation’s most vulnerable populations. Instead of wielding aggressive levers, such as IPAB, that would drastically and arbitrarily cut Medicare spending without regard to patient health, we must begin a broader discussion on achieving value across the health care system.

The National Pharmaceutical Council (NPC) has kicked off this discussion through a request for research proposals to address critical questions that should be at the center of any broad-based, forward-thinking health policy discussion.

Among these questions, we should consider how much should we, as a nation, be spending on health care? Is there a reasonable limit and, if so, how should we determine and measure it?

We also need to answer how dollars be allocated across the various sectors of health care, and whether spending and outcomes be evaluated on a sector-by-sector or holistic basis.

Developing a health care system that is both sustainable and outcomes-driven requires us to ask the right questions and develop well-researched, evidence-based, supportable answers. That‘s why NPC is committed to having a dialogue that looks at all aspects of our health spending challenges. The Medicare Trustees reminded us last week that, while our time to do this work is not unlimited, we do have the time to get it right.

For more information on NPC’s request for research concept proposals, including guidelines for submission and our proposal template, view the full RFP.