Additional research and experimentation can help us address difficult questions such as how best to measure quality and cost-effectiveness in health-care delivery and how to give doctors and hospitals incentives to adopt best practices and improved information technologies. The solutions we choose for access and quality will interact in important ways with the third critical issue – the issue of cost.
Greater access to health care will improve health outcomes, but it almost certainly will raise financial costs. Increasing the quality of health care, although highly desirable, could also result in higher total health-care spending.