Fixing our broken health care system

The American health care system is killing us. I wish I meant that metaphorically, but sadly, it’s true. Every year, costs keep skyrocketing while patient outcomes get worse and find new lows. Over the past two years, the average U.S. life expectancy has fallen by two years and remains roughly six years behind the life expectancy of comparable first-world countries. At the same time, costs continue rising at an astonishing rate. Every year since 1999, businesses and individuals have paid more for health insurance. Government health care spending has also skyrocketed during the same time. Since CMS began tracking health care expenditures in 1960, government health care spending has grown every year. Today, 29 percent of all federal spending is spent on health care, and 17.3 percent of the entire U.S. economy is spent on health care.  

It is a scandal that we pay so much for health care yet have so little to show for it. The state of health care in America is deeply broken, and Congress has failed to improve the American health care system. 

Democrats tried and failed to fix our health care system by passing ObamaCare in 2010. Americans did not get to keep their doctors, government spending exploded, businesses paid more, and individual premiums rose. In 2017, Republican efforts to replace ObamaCare failed to pass the Senate. Since then, there’s been no serious attempt to reform health care by Congress and our health care system remains broken. 

When solving problems, it’s important to align responsibility and authority. Then there can be accountability. Congress is often structured to prevent that alignment in order displace blame and avoid accountability. 

One of the driving reasons Congress has not fixed our health care system, is because the committees aren’t organized properly to holistically address the issue. Jurisdiction over health care issues is spread out among a number of subcommittees such as Energy and Commerce, Ways and Means, Education and Workforce in the House. Each committee referral doubles the effort and energy to bring a bill to the floor.  

The current piecemeal approach to health care ensures that transformative changes are impossible, and small changes can only be half measures. Additionally, each committee’s other jurisdictions take hearing and markup time from addressing health care issues. The supposed primary “health care committee,” Energy and Commerce Committee (E&C), boasts on its website that it has the broadest jurisdiction in Congress, including: telecommunications, energy policy, environmental policy, trade, and commercial regulation. These issues are important in their own right but distract from health care policy reform. To fix the American health care system and create policy reform, we need a committee that is focused and accountable. 

That is why I have introduced my HEALTH (the House Endeavor to Accelerate a Legislative Transformation in Healthcare) Act of 2024. This legislation would amend the organizing resolution of the House of Representatives to create the first-ever standing committee in Congress solely devoted to health care issues. This would include jurisdiction over the FDA, HHS, CDC, health insurance markets, CMS, and broadly understood, any major issue affecting health care in America. Democrat and Republican members sitting on this committee might disagree radically on the policies that the committee would create. However, for the first time, we would be able to have these debates in a committee that could advance legislation to the floor on its own. 

My bill is a commonsense solution to take the first step in reforming a dysfunctional status quo. The first step in that journey is treating health care as an essential issue meriting its own devoted standing committee of jurisdiction at the congressional level. I offer this modest proposal as the first step in what will no doubt be a long but necessary journey towards a healthier America, a balanced budget, and God willing, a government small enough to fit inside the Constitution. 

Warren Davidson represents Ohio’s 8th District.