I am heartened to see health reform on the move. Today, Health CEOs for Health Reform will explain exactly why and how we can and should expect health care leaders to work together to make Americans healthier, while bending the health care cost growth curve. A credible roadmap to reduce health care cost growth will help us achieve both bipartisan reform and fiscal balance.

Information on the event (12:30pm, Senate side of the Capitol Visitors Center) is available here and their specific set of recommendations are available here.

Health CEOs for Health Reform leaders are committed to providing everyone—including our most vulnerable—the highest quality most efficient care. They are courageous because they are willing to: 

• Recognize the importance of patient-centeredness, and emphasize the value in comparative effectiveness research and best practice processes
• Explain why fee-for-service payment is unsustainable
• Expect providers to be held accountable to reasonable cost and quality standards at a specified date
• Support a transition toward more integrated, coordinated models of care that require providers of all types to work together to keep patients healthy
• Use Medicare payment reform as the catalyst to transforming incentives system-wide
• Identify supporting policy changes to make payment reform more effective

Leadership from the health care community is critical to delivering on the promises of coverage for all, higher quality, and lower costs. Health CEOs for Health Reform prove if we look and learn from our own backyards, we can achieve our goals.

To be sustainable economically and politically over time, legislation must be bipartisan. It is encouraging to see Republicans, Democrats, and stakeholder organizations working together to address the many challenges facing our health system, despite the odds and forces that work against such collaboration.