- Healthcare may be complicated, but it’s still fixable, according to four Michigan experts
- The expert panel spoke about the reasons for surging healthcare costs at the inaugural Bridge Issues Summit in Detroit
- Each offered ideas to drive down costs
DETROIT — The reasons behind surging healthcare costs are complicated, but reining them is still possible.
That was the message from four policy experts during a panel discussion last week at the inaugural Bridge Michigan Issues Summit, which also featured panel discussions on housing affordability, data centers and education. The four healthcare panelists discussed both the reasons for surging health costs and ways to untangle them.
The panel discussion, “Healthcare Affordability: Why Costs Are Rising and What It Means for Michiganders,” began by laying out the problems.
“We have the most inefficient, fragmented, non-system of healthcare of any developed country in the world,” said Marianne Udow-Phillips, founding executive director of the Ann Arbor-based Center for Health & Research Transformation.
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Built on multiple payers and complex billing, it has been estimated that 30% of US healthcare costs are administrative, she said. New drugs on average top $200,000, she noted.
The panel discussion was a result of Bridge Listens, a yearlong effort to hear from residents about the state’s top issues heading into the 2026 election. More than 1-in-5 of the more than 6,400 survey responses named healthcare costs as a top concern.
- Read Bridge’s ongoing coverage of medical costs, the state’s failure to control them, and what the candidates say about them.
The responses helped drive a Bridge examination of those costs and what fuels them, including a drug rebate program known as 340B, facility fees, costly new therapies, and rising insurance premiums.
Journalists also chronicled promises by gubernatorial candidates.
As Bridge has previously reported, a growing number of Americans are uninsured, having lost coverage under commercial insurance and Medicaid.
That’s a costly gap, as uninsured patients skip routine care, which allows health problems to spiral into costly emergency care, Udow-Phillips and other panelists said last Wednesday.
Those patients “come in later, they come in sicker, and that puts more pressure on the system,” she said.
Meanwhile, costs continue to increase for hospitals — for staff, for drugs, for cutting-edge equipment and technology, said Laura Appel, executive vice president at the Michigan Health & Hospital Association. (Editor’s note: The Michigan Health & Hospital Association is a funder of Bridge Michigan. It was not involved in the reporting or editing of this story.)
“You’re not driving a car from 1952, so you probably don’t want a hospital that was last upgraded in 1952,” Appel said. “We’ve got to update so we can take care of people appropriately with what we know is appropriate patient care.”
Those pressures, she said, drive consolidation of healthcare as hospitals seek “economies of scale.”
Udow-Phillips pushed back, arguing that consolidation can further drive up overall healthcare costs.
And where are patients in all of this?
“We have families that are just trying to be healthy. They’re trying to get their kids to school. They’re trying to go to work,” said Deidre Hurse, a health researcher at Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine. “Opposing them is a complicated health system that isn’t giving them the grace to be healthy.”
Panelists at the Issues Summit also answered audience questions about costs and healthcare consolidation, accusations that Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan is a monopoly and the lack of access to behavioral health treatment.
They also offered solutions.
Dr. Latonya Riddle-Jones, of the Wayne State University School of Medicine, called for more GLP-1 drugs — medications that have been shown effective in controlling not only weight but a host of dangerous and costly chronic conditions.
“What are we doing? They prevent diabetes, obesity, all the chronic illnesses. If we just had access to these medications for everyone, oh my goodness, these costs would go down.”
Appel agreed, saying costs for the drugs are high, but less expensive than uncontrolled diseases that they curb.
For her part, Appel called for better educating young people on ways to stay healthy. Too often, she said, health in school is focused only on reproductive health.
Hurse called for greater focus on quality outcomes, rather than simply paying for services: “We have to figure out how to offer value-based care funding structures.”
And Udow-Phillips called for more action in Lansing: the creation of a state health plan and a drug affordability board, for example.
“As a state, we need to take more control over healthcare spending away from the government,” she said.
See the full Issues Summit here:
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