The $3 Trillion Question

What Health Care Reform Can Save For Families, Businesses and Taxpayers

Without health care reform, the United States is projected to spend over $40 trillion on health care in the next decade.  Experts estimate that thirty percent of that spending – up to $12 trillion dollars – will be wasted on ineffective care, pointless red tape, and counterproductive treatments that can actually harm patients.     As a result, American families and businesses are weighed down by high premiums that continue to increase twice as fast as inflation.  Meanwhile, cost-benefit analyses performed by the Business Roundtable show that, dollar for dollar, we get less for our health care spending than the rest of the industrialized. Health care reform holds out the golden promise of addressing both of these problems at once.  By aligning incentives within the health care system in favor of quality treatment, by investing in health information technology, and by conducting better research on which treatments work for which kinds of patients, we can make health care both more affordable and higher quality. 

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