West Health Lowering Healthcare Costs

Lowering Healthcare Costs

Accelerate Adoption of Value-Based Care

West Health is continuing its efforts by focusing on three common-sense reforms – lowering the cost of prescription drugs, accelerating the adoption of value-based care models, and increasing price transparency for consumers and employers.

The Opportunity

The U.S. is still stuck in a system of volume-based (fee-for-service) care that continues to drive up costs without providing better outcomes for patients. At a time when so many Americans are looking for new solutions to high prices and poor health outcomes, value-based care can not only slow the trajectory of high costs but fundamentally reshape the way we approach health services.

Our Goal

Real reform entails redefining financial incentives toward reduced costs, greater efficiencies, better health outcomes, and more person-centered care. Adopting value-based models of care would reward positive effects—including preventive care and improved management of diseases and conditions with fewer complications—and discourage unnecessary and potentially harmful care.

Learn More About the 2019 Healthcare Costs Innovation Summit

The rising cost of healthcare is a growing and major threat to our economy, our financial security, and our individual health. For too long, we’ve been paying too much and not getting enough in return. The U.S. healthcare system is on an unsustainable cost trajectory. We have an urgent need to address this cost crisis so that healthcare can become more accessible and more affordable for all Americans. Now is the time.

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Taking Action

The U.S. healthcare system must accelerate the shift from fee-for-service care to alternative payment models to drive down healthcare costs and improve care quality.

Key to this shift is for major insurers and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) to fast-track development and deployment of effective incentives and policies that facilitate the movement of patients, providers and health systems from fee-for-service payment systems to value-based care models with two-sided risk.

Stakeholders should begin scaling successful models with enough flexibility so they can be adapted across communities and healthcare settings.

Our Focus Areas - Three Common-Sense Reforms

Three common-sense reforms – lowering the cost of prescription drugs, accelerating the adoption of value-based care models, and increasing price transparency for consumers and employers. West Health, a family of nonprofit and nonpartisan organizations that spans research, policy and philanthropy, convened major figures from the worlds of healthcare, business, policy and media for a national summit on how to best drive these reforms to create a system that is more transparent, competitive, affordable, person-centered, quality-driven and sustainable.