For Immediate Release:
Contact: Kelly Broadway, 202-808-8853
[email protected]
Washington, D.C. – Joel White, President of the Council for Affordable Health Coverage (CAHC), testified today before the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions in a hearing titled “Making Health Care Affordable Again: Healing a Broken System.”
In his testimony, White warned that rising ACA premiums, higher deductibles, and shrinking coverage options are leaving families and small businesses with fewer choices and mounting costs. He emphasized that the current system has become less competitive and increasingly dominated by large hospital and insurance monopolies, driving prices ever higher.
“The ACA has intensified – not solved – the affordability crisis, pushing many small-business employees into more expensive coverage and burdening taxpayers with escalating subsidies that fail to address underlying cost drivers,” said Joel White, President of the Council for Affordable Health Coverage. “Health care has become a system where families pay more and get less, while consolidation pushes prices up and choices down. It’s time to put consumers, not corporations, back in charge.”
He urged Congress to pursue reforms that broaden choice, enhance competition, and give individuals and small businesses more flexible pathways to affordable coverage.
- Give help to consumers, not corporations, via Health Savings Accounts that allow people to use money for care
- Help small businesses by providing a tax credit to expand coverage and new options like Association Health Plans and gig worker HSAs
- Reduce medical costs by passing the Healthy Competition for Better Care Act, which lowers taxpayer and patient premiums
- Break up local hospital monopolies
- Expand HSAs to all Silver plan enrollees (13 million) and make permanent small business CHOICE Arrangements