Reforming Health Care

Ask any student, parent, worker or small business owner and they will tell you that the skyrocketing cost of health care is one of the greatest challenges we face.  Rising costs hurt family budgets, business’s bottom lines and make access to health care more difficult for everyone.

Health care is simply too expensive and in need of serious reform.  Congress should embrace consumer-driven, common-sense health care solutions to ensure everyone has access to affordable, high quality health care that they, not government bureaucrats, control.

We can do this by expanding competition in the health care marketplace, increasing transparency for both costs and services, focusing on prevention and quality, allowing small businesses to band together to purchase more affordable health insurance and putting doctors and patients in charge of health care decisions.

These investments will help lower costs and improve quality by dramatically reducing administrative costs, enabling doctors across the system to have access to patient information when and where they need it, and reducing medical errors. We also need to reform our payment system so providers are reimbursed for quality of care, as opposed to simply the number of procedures they perform.

I believe all Americans should have access to affordable, high quality health insurance that they control.  We can accomplish this without a government run system – by empowering consumers, doctors and the innovation that Minnesota and American are known for when it comes to health care.

As a co-chair of the House Medical Technology Caucus I will promote using the latest technology to help lower costs and improve quality for better outcomes for patients.  Minnesota is home to the most cutting-edge developments in medical technology we should use these homegrown innovations to reform and improve health care practices across the nation.