Lowering Healthcare Costs

Each and every week, I hear from constituents about their struggles to afford their care and navigate the healthcare system, and they desperately want Congress to take action to make our system more simple, transparent and affordable.

We spend more on healthcare as a percentage of our economy than any other developed nation. And for their money, Americans are rewarded with a bureaucratic and overly burdensome system. They see the corporations responsible for providing and paying for care go to great lengths to hide costs, deny payment for care, and weigh patients down in complexity.

That’s why as a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, I worked to develop, cosponsor and vote in favor of the Promoting Access to Treatments and Increasing Extremely Needed Transparency Act, or the PATIENT Act of 2023 (H.R. 3561). The PATIENT Act contains a number of bipartisan proposals to make healthcare more affordable. The bill will lower healthcare costs by increasing price transparency throughout the system and addressing the rising cost of prescription drugs.

The PATIENT Act will help Americans understand what happens when their insurer owns their doctor, their pharmacy, and possibly a Pharmacy Benefit Manager (PBM) — and if that is driving value or unaffordable costs for our healthcare system. Several provisions would ensure patients only pay for the care they need — regardless of setting, and other provisionswill reduce what patients and employers pay for medicines through transparency and competition. The PATIENT Act also includes policies to address incentives for consolidation in federal healthcare programs. And I was proud to advance one of the bills I introduced — the Promoting Transparency and Healthy Competition in Medicare Act (H.R. 3282) — to be part of the PATIENT Act.

I look forward to enacting the PATIENT Act and similar healthcare reforms into law.