Letter to Senate HELP Chairman Lamar Alexander

Senator Lamar Alexander
Chairman, Senate HELP Committee

Dear Chairman Alexander:

Thank you for the opportunity to share our thoughts on the steps Congress should take to lower health costs, incentivize care that improves health outcomes, and enhance patients’ ability to access their health information in order to make informed decisions. The Council for Affordable Health Coverage (CAHC) is a broad-based alliance with a singular focus: bringing down the cost of health care for all Americans. Our membership represents a broad range of interests – organizations representing small and large employers, manufacturers, retailers, insurers, patient groups, and physician organizations. As a result, these comments reflect the positions of CAHC, but may not necessarily reflect the individual views of all members.

Our message is simple: we encourage you to enact policies that hold total spending growth to less than wage growth so that health coverage will become more affordable for all Americans. While some of the ideas outlined in this letter are easy to do, others will require difficult, and politically unpopular choices. But the return could be, effectively, a pay raise for working families of about $10,000 per year.