The Institute of Medicine estimates that 40 percent of each dollar we spend on healthcare is spent on medically inappropriate or unsafe services.

CHCC strategies to remedy health system failures include:

• Organizing large and small group purchasers of healthcare in local markets and statewide to assert their voice in educating for better care and lower costs for everyone;
  
• Developing collaborations with health plans and service providers to measure and report performance, establish improvement goals, and reward providers when they verifiably meet these goals; and
  
• Educating stakeholders on public policies to achieve improvements in health industry transparency and accountability.

CHCC’s strategy brings employers, unions and trust funds together to leverage their consumers’ voice at the federal, state and local levels to require performance transparency and improvement based on the billions of dollars our Members spend to provide coverage to their workers and their families.

It is at the state level that medical practices are reported and monitored. Consequently, CHCC is focused on working with doctors and hospitals, the health plans, and the government agencies responsible for medical reporting to make healthcare data more accessible to patients and to purchasers. Accountability for over-inflated costs and bad patient outcomes cannot be achieved until there is transparency in service and cost data. CHCC believes that information is power and informed choices come from the ability to access statistically sound, quality information about service providers on a state and local level.

CHCC’s focus on local purchaser organizing reflects two key facts. First, healthcare services are locally delivered, so purchasers can most rapidly affect the quality and cost of healthcare when they organize locally. Second, the purchasing community is highly fragmented, leaving purchasers without the necessary market influence to require
performance information or improvement. Even the largest purchasers in a community represent only a tiny fraction of the business of a major commercial health plan or community provider. When CHCC organizes and represents the interests of multiple employers, trust funds and unions, we effectively engage health plans and providers on quality and cost issues in ways that benefit everyone.