There ought to be at least one issue in American life that rises above partisan reflex: the health of the American people.
Republicans, Democrats, and independents may disagree on taxes, spending, regulation, and the size of government. But every one of us should want the same basic things from our healthcare system: better access, better outcomes, lower costs, and more confidence.
Yet in the wealthiest nation on earth, despite building the most expensive healthcare system in history (costing more than $15,000 per person per year, nearly one-fifth of our national economy) Americans live shorter lives than those in peer nations. Preventable disease remains rampant. Medical debt remains one of the most common financial shocks in American life, and care is often delayed because families can’t afford it.
It is an embarrassing systemic failure that demands honesty, innovation, and significant reform.
The seeds have been planted for a movement in which Americans take back control from a healthcare system that costs too much, delivers too little, and leaves too many feeling anxious, angry, and powerless.
Specifically, the first reform is the most obvious one. America needs a standardized national healthcare database — a transparent backbone for accumulating claims and outcomes data across all payers, public and private.
Not government-run healthcare. Not eliminating private insurance. Not rationing care.
Just a modern system of accountability in a $4.5 trillion sector that today operates without a single, transparent set of books.
Only about 10% of Americans — those in traditional Medicare — have claims data that can be systematically analyzed for waste, fraud, cost, and outcomes. For the other 90%, healthcare claims are scattered across more than a thousand private insurers, each operating under different rules, formats, and systems.
Imagine if the federal government tried to track tax revenue using a thousand incompatible accounting systems. That is how we run healthcare.
It is financially draining us and, too often, costing lives.
Administrative costs consume about 10% of total healthcare spending — far higher than in many peer nations. Providers must submit bills to countless insurers. Employers struggle to compare prices. Patients are left guessing what anything costs until the bill arrives.
We do not just spend more because Americans are sicker. We spend more because the system is opaque, fragmented, and built to obscure prices.
Perhaps most unconscionably, prevention has never become the national priority it should be. We spend trillions managing avoidable illness on the back end while underinvesting in the transparency, data, diagnostics, and accountability that could help prevent suffering in the first place.
This is not a failure of doctors, nurses, or hospitals. American medicine is innovative and world-class. The failure is structural.
A national database would allow modern analytics and AI tools to detect fraud, overbilling, and pricing disparities in real time. It would give patients real price transparency instead of marketing slogans. It would help employers and families understand what they are paying for. It would give researchers the ability to study outcomes across the entire population, not just a sliver of it.
Imagine having tens of millions of records to compare the best treatments for diabetes, heart disease, cancer, maternity care, and chronic illness. That is how a system begins moving from treating sickness late to preventing illness earlier.
Patients would retain the right to opt out of data exchange, just as they do with electronic health records. But most Americans want lower costs and better results, not higher prices and more secrecy.
If transparency, fraud detection, administrative simplification, and better prevention helped reduce U.S. healthcare costs by even one-third, the savings could reach roughly $1.5 trillion per year — nearly equivalent to the annual federal deficit – easing pressure on both families and businesses.
That’s not marginal reform. It is economic oxygen.
Better still, reform should not be framed as punishment, but as leadership.
Hospitals, insurers, pharmaceutical companies, and providers that voluntarily embrace data integration and cost reduction should be publicly recognized for doing so. Congress, or an independent bipartisan commission, should establish a “Healthcare Patriot Award” honoring those who materially lower costs, improve outcomes, and share data in the national interest.
Prestige and public trust matter. Employers would favor recognized institutions. Patients would seek them out. Investors would reward them. Transparency would become a competitive advantage rather than a regulatory burden.
Healthcare should never have become a partisan issue. Transparency is neither liberal nor conservative. Efficiency is not ideological. Patriotism is not political.
Taking back control begins with knowing what we are paying for, what is working, what is failing, and who is willing to help fix it.
The American people deserve, and need, a renewed national health strategy.
In the approaching midterm elections, voters should apply a simple litmus test: is a candidate merely talking about healthcare reform, or are they prepared to advance a new national health paradigm — one that makes wellness, prevention, early diagnostics, and rooting out fraud central to the way America thinks about health
Because a system devoted mainly to treating illness after it appears will never be as strong, affordable, or humane as one designed to help prevent it in the first place.
Lynn Barr, MPH, is the Founder of Caravan Health and a Health Policy Expert
