Read the full testimony here.
My name is Brian Blase, and I was privileged to work for the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform from 2011 through 2014. You have vital jobs serving the American people, and it is an honor to testify before this Committee today on this important topic.
I am the founder and president of a new health policy think tank—Paragon Health Institute. My testimony today represents my views and not those of Paragon. I am also a senior research fellow at the Galen Institute and a visiting fellow at the Foundation for Government Accountability. From 2017 through 2019, I served as a Special Assistant to the President for Economic Policy at the White House’s National Economic Council. In that capacity, I led policy and regulatory work on several areas that I am testifying about today, including Association Health Plans, short-term limited-duration health plans, individual coverage health reimbursement arrangements, and price transparency rules.
The title of today’s hearing is “Exploring Pathways to Affordable, Universal Health Coverage.” I’m here to discuss how we can achieve more affordable, higher quality health care—a worthy goal that nearly everyone supports. The goal of achieving universal health coverage can only be achieved if both health care and health coverage are affordable—and for too many people today, they are not. I will focus my testimony on how to achieve more affordable and higher-quality health care which will lead to millions more people having health coverage.
In many areas of the economy, products and services have become higher in quality over time while real prices, after accounting for inflation, have declined (Figure below: “Price Changes”).[1] Unfortunately, this has not been the case for most health care products and services.[2] As the following figure shows, prices for hospital services—the largest component of health care expenditures—have increased more than three times faster than general inflation over the past two decades.[3] As health costs have risen, insurance premiums have correspondingly soared, even as plan deductibles have risen dramatically. In 2020, health care spending was 19.7 percent of U.S. Gross Domestic Product, a 6.4 percentage point increase and 48 percent increase from the 13.3 percent of U.S. GDP expended on health care in 2000.[4]Importantly, over the past few decades, there have been some noticeable advances in health, such as a decline in cardiac mortality, improvement in cancer survival rates, a cure for Hepatitis C, and new AIDS treatments. However, there is also significant waste in the health sector and health outcomes have recently stagnated despite the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) new spending and the significant expansion of Medicaid. American life expectancy was lower in 2019 than it was in 2013, before the ACA’s coverage and spending provisions took effect.[5]