April 1, 2022
At POLITICO’s inaugural Health Care Summit, Alliance of Community Health Plans (ACHP) President and CEO Ceci Connolly spoke with members of Congress and industry leaders about expanding access to care in today’s political climate. The session, Cracking America’s Health Care Access Puzzle, explored the necessity of staving off coverage losses when the Medicaid continuous coverage requirement, enhanced marketplace subsidies and the public health emergency expires.
“Health care is real. It’s real people, it’s human and it’s local. The problem with our health care system today is that we pay people to do stuff to you. If when I worked at the Washington Post, the editor walked up to my desk and said, ‘Ceci, we’re going to pay you by the word,’ my stories would have gotten longer, not better.
“But that’s what we are saying to doctors and nurses and hospitals and radiologists every single day in this country. We are saying, ‘we are going to pay you more to operate, to write a prescription, to run another scan, to bring somebody into the office,’ over, and over, and over again. As a result, we do not get our money’s worth for our health care dollar in this country.
“So all of these [efforts to support providers] are pressing on the balloon, but they’re not getting at the fundamental, underlying drivers of cost in our health care system and the outcomes that we get for the one-fifth of GDP that we spend on health care today. So until we actually start thinking about delivering care differently, including hospital-at-home, virtual care, remote monitoring — all of which, by the way, are big savers — and start paying for value and health outcomes, this all is just nibbling at the edges.” — ACHP President and CEO Ceci Connolly
View the full POLITICO Health Care Summit session here.
Moderator: Megan Messerly, Health Care Reporter, POLITICO
Panelists:
- Ceci Connolly, President and CEO, Alliance of Community Health Plans (ACHP)
- Larry Levitt, Executive Vice President, Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF)
- Rep. Ro Khanna, D-CA
- Rep. Michael Burgess, R-TX
