Cost Containment and Coverage Expansion

Mark Merlis
Health Policy Consultant

Choices about covering the uninsured have implications for the feasibility of different approaches for controlling health care costs, and vice versa. In practice, some combinations may work together better than others and the interplay of different approaches to coverage expansion and cost containment is the focus of Cost Containment and Coverage Expansion. It begins with a brief review of whether coverage expansion and cost controls must go hand-in-hand. It then lays out the menus of commonly proposed coverage approaches and available cost control measures and considers how the two might go together.

Click here to download the full working paper, commissioned by a joint study panel of the National Academy of Social Insurance and the National Academy of Public Administration on Administrative Solutions in Health Reform. For a list of other papers and study panel members, click here. The project is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.