BPC Announces New Health System Executive Council to Advise on Health Policy

Washington, D.C.– As the health care sector braces for the possibility of uncertain changes, the Bipartisan Policy Center today announced that it is bringing together top executives from some of the nation’s leading hospital and health systems to help guide BPC’s Future of Health Care initiative. This new Health System Executive Council will advise BPC’s policy work to ensure the expertise and experience of health care providers is taken into account. In addition, the council will help inform the activities of BPC’s larger health program, including its work on health insurance, health innovation, and prevention.

Currently, the council includes the following chief executives: Barry Arbuckle of MemorialCare Health System; Lloyd Dean of Dignity Health; David Feinberg of Geisinger Health; Trevor Fetter of Tenet Healthcare; Robert Henkel of Ascension; and Kim Horn of Kaiser Permanente.

“With hospitals and health systems providing care to tens of millions of Americans, we welcome the opportunity to join BPC in its health care reform efforts,” said the members of the Health System CEO Council. “We have a shared vision that any reforms must maintain access, control cost growth, and increase quality and value of care. As the administration and Congress contemplate the future of America’s health care system, we will work with BPC to make sure the policies under consideration take into account the needs and daily realities of our nation’s hospitals, health systems; physicians, nurses and clinical partners; and the patients we serve.”

“There is great value in bringing together these health system leaders to gain an understanding of the innovations they deploy to meet the challenges in health care quality, cost, and access and where opportunities for change exist,” said BPC Senior Vice President Bill Hoagland.

BPC’s Future of Health Care initiative is co-chaired by former Senate Majority Leaders Tom Daschle and Bill Frist; BPC senior advisor and former acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Andy Slavitt; and senior fellow, Project Hope and former administrator of the Health Care Financing Administration Gail Wilensky. They are collaborating with a team of health policy experts from across the policy spectrum to serve as a resource to policymakers and to develop politically viable solutions to our nation’s health care challenges.

BPC Action’s Voices of Care audio project is the latest resource for policymakers, bringing first-hand stories and advice from health care leaders in the trenches about the health care challenges, successes, and solutions they believe our country should focus on.

This bipartisan group of experts has stressed over the past several months that cooperation across party lines is critical to creating legislation that will be sustainable over the long-term. “The current political debate on health care is in part the result of the inability of the parties to work together and compromise. A fully partisan result this year will exacerbate existing divisions and make it more difficult to find a lasting solution,” said members BPC’s Future of Health Care initiative.

BPC health policy experts have also identified several areas in health care that should be addressed with broad support, including: policies that promote stable private health insurance markets (including cost-sharing reduction payments) and include pre-existing condition protections; value-based benefit designs that incentivize delivery of medically appropriate care; reforms that increase the efficiency of service delivery through appropriate combinations of both public and private incentives while improving the nation’s long-term fiscal position; approaches to affordability that do not over-subsidize higher-income Americans or under-subsidize lower-income Americans; and Medicaid policies that expand administrative flexibility without creating financial risk for states, the federal government, or the beneficiaries of the program.