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Solutions to Affordable Health Insurance in Colorado

This conference is about "win-win" solutions in health care. We come from different perspectives, but I suspect we all agree on the need to think out of the box to find solutions. Health care costs now absorb over 15% of U.S. national income and output compared to less than 5% forty years ago. To put this in perspective, over the same time period the share of income we spend on K-12 education has risen from just over 3% to around 4.5%. Yet many feel we are "throwing money" at education to spend so much.

While spending on K-12 has increased by 50%, spending on health care has tripled. Health is important -- but every dollar we spend on health care is a dollar we can't spend on education, the environment, or other areas we also value. We know that good health comes from a clean environment and an educated population as much as it does from treatments and medications, so sacrificing them to pay for more health care may not be such a good deal. And despite having the highest health care spending in the world, we have rising numbers of our population without any -- or adequate -- insurance coverage. The pressures to expand access to health care are as strong as the pressures to control costs.

When you talk affordability or cost containment, this can raise hackles for practitioners -- and patients -- about quality of care. Calls for increased access or universal coverage make some think, "This is going to cost me big -- and I'm already paying too much." We often face trade-offs between cost, quality, and access. If we only cared about holding down costs and were willing to sacrifice quality or access, finding solutions in health care would not be so hard. Each of our speakers will address ways to get true increases in efficiency -- holding the line on costs while increasing coverage, access, and quality of care.

-- Daphne Greenwood, PhD: Conference Organizer, Center for Colorado Policy Studies

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