Note: This is the third blog from my ThinkPiece article in the Des Moines Business Record. Here are blogs one and two. Attacking healthcare's true cost-drivers - such as unhealthy lifestyles, chronic diseases, misaligned payment incentives to health providers, ineffective and unsafe care, uncoordinated care, and powerful lobbying activities that protect many of these cost-drivers - continue to percolate below the surface and remain mostly hidden from public scrutiny. In some cases, badly-needed policy action is required. One major cost-driver is waste, estimated by the Institute of Medicine to be about 30 percent of health spending on unnecessary services, excessive administrative costs, fraud and many other issues. We are far from resolving these problems. Employer-sponsored insurance covers about 56 percent of the U.S. population, roughly 147 million people. This number dwarfs Read More >