United States Alexander Tender

Senate health committee Chairman Lamar Alexander R-Tenn. said the health care debate should move from health insurance to health care costs.At an event hosted by Axios today Alexander discussed his 2019 health care policy priorities specifically reducing the cost of health care with Axios co-founder and Executive Editor Mike Allen. My focus over the next two years is to see if we can do one or two big things to reduce health care costs and maybe 10 or 12 little things and try to move the whole debate from health insurance where weve been stuck for eight years arguing about six percent of the health insurance market thats Obamacare to health care costs Alexander said. Youll never get lower-cost health insurance until you have lower-cost health care.He added Weve had five hearings on reducing health care costs and Dr. Brent James who is a member of the American Academy of Medicine said that 30 to 50 percent of what we spend on health care is unnecessary. So I was so startled by that that I asked the other witnesses they agreed with him and I asked the next panel of witnesses and the next and they agreed with him too. That means that of the huge amount we spend on health care we unnecessarily spend an amount of money thats more than the gross domestic product of every country in the world but nine.Mike Allen You said that one of the biggest problems is people dont know the true cost of their health care.Alexander Well thats it. The first thing is to get rid of the barriers in the way of innovators but nobody knows the cost. Secretary Azar is going to be here. Hes got a great story about how he went for a procedure and found out it costs several thousand dollars and he got on the website and checked around and found out he could get it for 550 in the doctors office. So the way our system is set up you dont know the price and if no one knows the price prices arent going to come down.Mike Allen Now you talked about the next two years and in January were going to have divided government What is one big thing that you believe you can accomplish next year as ChairmanAlexander Well Ive talked already with Senator Patty Murray and on my short list is reducing health care costs. Im going to focus on making the system more of a market getting rid of barriers and if I could find a way or ways to make it possible for those of us who buy health care services every day to know the price of what were paying for that would be the single most important thing I could focus on for two years. I mean we should do that. The Members of Congress should not sit around with the facts in front of us that were spending 1 to 1.8 trillion unnecessarily on health care and not do anything about it.