Cost Containment and Coverage Expansion

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 this paper. 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.