Goal: Research, public education and leaership training to achieve guaranteed, high quality health care for all.

Leadership

Organization’s Objective

American workers, their families, employers, and government face a common crisis of staggering health insurance cost increases; yet public debate over health care reform is too frequently framed essentially as a question of redistributing the health insurance cost burden between them: employer v. individual mandates, payroll v. income taxes, public v. private financing, tax increases v. controlling public debt, etc. By framing the health care reform debate primarily as a "Who should pay the rising costs?" question (a zero-sum solution to a common problem), public discourse typically results in polarizing business from labor, employers from their employees, and progressives from others in ways that undermine opportunities to build the consensus needed to win public support for effective health care reform.

Worse, public debate that begins (and often ends) with the issue of redistributing the unsustainable burden of rising health costs fails to address seriously how we, as a society, can assure quality health care while controlling costs that rise continuously at 2.5 to 5 times the rate of GNP, business revenues, or workers wages.

Absent identification of the significant cost drivers in American health care or understanding of how they can be controlled without compromising quality, a polarizing debate over distribution of costs is the most likely outcome ? indeed, the very debate America has endured for nearly 60 years. Meanwhile, the failure of Americans to reach consensus over how to reform health care and control costs continues to aggravate an unsustainable economic burden and exclude ever-increasing numbers of Americans from access to quality care.