Health

BPC’s Health Program develops bipartisan policy recommendations that will improve health care quality, lower costs, and enhance coverage and delivery. Our work focuses on coverage and access to care, delivery system reform, cost containment, chronic and long-term care, and rural and behavioral health.

The Health Innovation Initiative centers on advancing new and emerging technologies and strategies to improve the health and health care of all Americans. Our work supports accelerating the discovery, development, and delivery of safe and effective cures and treatments; using artificial intelligence (AI) to augment patients’ care; and tapping into the Internet of Connected Medical Devices (IoMT) which spans a range of devices in order to accelerate medical progress and promote a more collaborative team approach to treating and healing patients.

BPC’s public health work focuses on chronic disease prevention, social determinants of health, nutrition and physical activity, and the infrastructure necessary to promote healthy communities and institutions. We tackle some of the most important public health issues facing America, including the opioid addiction epidemic, the obesity crisis, and public health emergency preparedness and response.

BPC’s Future of Health Care Initiative serves as a resource to policymakers and business leaders by developing politically viable solutions to our nation’s health care challenges. The work of this bipartisan group of nationally known health experts is based on a common understanding of health care reform. Their goal is to slow rising costs, promote greater access to affordable insurance coverage, and improve the quality of care delivered to patients.

With hospitals and health systems providing care to tens of millions of Americans, their voice is critical to BPC’s efforts to improve our health care system. That’s why we created the Health Systems Executive Council, which includes some of the nation’s leading executives from Ascension, Geisinger Health, Johns Hopkins Medicine, Kaiser Permanente, and MemorialCare Health System. They help guide our policy work to ensure the expertise and experience of health care providers is considered when creating solutions. BPC believes there is great value in bringing together these leaders to gain an understanding of the innovations they utilize to meet the challenges in health care quality, cost, and access, and where opportunities exist for change.

BPC’s Rural Health Task Force aims to improve the health and health care of the nearly 60 million Americans living in rural communities. These residents are generally older and poorer, more uninsured or underinsured, and less healthy. They also face alarming rates of hospital closures, health care worker shortages, and geographic challenges to getting timely care compared to those living in urban areas. These issues should be a wake-up call to policymakers that we need to reinvent rural health care in America. The task force will address these challenges and create policy recommendations in 2020 building on options outlined in BPC’s 2018 report, Reinventing Rural Health Care: A Case Study of Seven Upper Midwest States.