Congress must deliver substantive health care reform in 2026

Health care costs continue to rank highly among concerns for everyday Americans, and many are calling on lawmakers for significant reforms: lowering those costs while restoring patient power.

Lawmakers are attempting to tackle the problem, with the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health recently holding hearings on health care affordability. I was fortunate enough to participate in the latest one on hospital costs.

The House committee is homing in on a central problem: too many government policies direct funds to insurance companies and big hospital systems rather than to patients themselves. Fund The Patient, an organization that supports policies to redirect those funds to patients, recently conducted a poll that reinforces this conclusion.

The polling reflects real life for millions of patients nationwide. Americans are reporting declining access and rising prices, including increasing hospital costs and insurance premiums. Hospital conglomerates are a major reason why. Rising premiums are not only an insurance story; they reflect exploding hospital prices driven by hospital consolidation. 

Consolidation to this degree has significant ripple effects. The health care landscape has become so treacherous that one-third of Americans have either cut spending in other areas or have gone into debt to pay for medical care, according to The New York Times. And polling shows that 75 percent of patients don’t believe our health care system is meeting the needs of most Americans.

When funding is tied more closely to patients, things change. Fewer resources are lost to fraud, administrative bloat,........

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