Starbucks now spends more on health care costs than on coffee beans. Health care is easily the fastest growing cost for businesses, large and small.
Health care spending is increasing twice as fast as inflation annually, and is expected to hit $4.3 trillion by 2017, said U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell when she was in Vancouver in early April.
Cantwell – who sits on the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees the Department of Health and Human Services – outlined a handful of measures she intends to introduce this year to reduce health care costs, increase healthy outcomes and provide incentives to attract physicians to rural areas.
Among them:
- The Physician Workforce Training Act, which would include interest-free loan programs to address the shortage of primary care physicians.
- The Preserving Primary Care Act, which aims to reward efficient Medicare providers. Medicare tends to penalize Washington providers because they are more cost-effective and gets better health results, Cantwell said.
- Project 2020, which would reduce federal Medicaid and Medicare costs by about $2.8 billion over five years by improving better access to home and community-based long-term care and avoiding Medicaid.
