Fixing America’s Broken Healthcare System
The Cicero Institute works with bold leaders to fix broken systems, and America’s broken healthcare system is among our country’s biggest challenges. Year after year, healthcare spending grows at an unsustainable rate. Rising costs force patients, employers, and government payers to shuffle funds from other priorities–replacing other consumer spending, reducing wage increases, and crowding out government spending. Without greater transparency and competition, prices will only continue to increase faster than inflation, access to necessary care will be reduced, quality will decline, and innovation will continue to be stifled.
The Cicero Institute builds policies to solve three major problems in America’s healthcare sector:
- Barriers to Access–Millions of Americans cannot access healthcare providers at the right time or right place.
- Rising Healthcare Prices–The price of healthcare in the United States continues to rise much faster than inflation, bankrupting individuals, crushing employer budgets, and burdening taxpayers with high costs of care.
- Improving Quality and Innovation–There are misaligned incentives and numerous barriers to innovation that shift focus away from better outcomes.
Through Cicero Action, the Cicero Institute achieved a great deal in the 2024 legislative sessions. For healthcare alone, 32 Cicero-inspired healthcare bills were filled across 15 states, 25 of which advanced to some degree in the process. Fourteen (44%) of those bills were enacted. Those numbers include new laws addressing expedited pathways to practice for internationally licensed physicians, enhancing telehealth access, increasing transparency, and improving electronic health record interoperability.
This success is not accidental. The Cicero Healthcare team has significant practical experience, with professional backgrounds that include running state Health and Human Services Agencies, senior positions for a State Attorney General and the Federal Department of Labor, attorneys, a pharmacist, and a former health system executive. This practical experience coupled with passion not only to publish meaningful policy ideas but also advance and implement them, will continue to yield successful outcomes for health policy across the country.
By expanding the policy menu for 2025, the Cicero healthcare team builds on that success to further address access, cost, and quality. Additionally, we are broadening the toolkit beyond legislatively focused policies to include those that can be implemented by bold governors and state agencies.
Healthcare is broken primarily due to government policies and reimbursement. Over the last several decades, state and federal governments have tried to fix America’s broken healthcare systems but created the wrong incentives. Since states control many of the laws that impact the daily lives of citizens, states can solve many of the healthcare challenges their citizens face. States have an opportunity to lead, and to set the example of what a functioning system can look like. It will take bold leadership, but doing so can serve as a model for future federal reforms.