The United States spends nearly double what many other high-income countries spend on health care. Even so, health outcomes for Americans are often worse, and evidence of waste and inefficiency abounds.
The high level of U.S. spending puts a tremendous strain on businesses, governments, and household budgets. It makes care increasingly unaffordable for people — even to the point where many forgo or postpone needed care — and diverts resources away from other needs and priorities.
The Commonwealth Fund’s Making Health Care Affordable program looks for ways to ensure that U.S. health care spending is efficient, sustainable, and designed to generate the best health outcomes possible. We work to understand the causes and impact of the increasing commercialization of health care and extreme profit-seeking behavior, and we encourage the adoption of evidenced-based approaches to lowering commercial prices. We also focus on high prescription drug prices, a major driver of costs.
These efforts complement the work of our Expanding Coverage and Access program to examine cost drivers in private and public insurance and to ensure coverage remains affordable and comprehensive.
2026 Program Funding Priorities
- Studying the ongoing commercialization of health care in the U.S. and how this trend is affecting health care costs, quality, access, and equity.
- Providing states with tools they can use to understand and control commercial health care spending and price growth.
