Our Approach to National Health Reform

Since 1997, Community Catalyst has worked to build consumer and community leadership to transform the American health care system. Because we believe this system will be successfully transformed only when consumers are fully engaged and have an organized voice, we work to ensure that the consumer voice is a part of any reform effort.

The heart of our work is supporting state consumer coalitions and running issue campaigns. Much of our most recent work has centered on state-level reform, so we will bring lessons learned from each state to propel the national effort.

We will:

• build the capacity of consumers in state environments to influence the national effort;
• facilitate participation by state advocacy groups in policy design and implementation activities and strategies; 
• promote policy that is supportive of state programs; and 
• work to protect vulnerable populations.

Our key issue areas include:

• guaranteed comprehensive benefits; 
• affordable premiums and cost sharing; 
• protected and strengthened Medicaid and Medicare programs; and 
• the reduction of racial and ethnic disparities and improvement of the quality of care, especially for people with chronic illnesses.