About the Center for Better Health

America spends more on health care than any other country in the world. We’re sicker than ever. It’s time to ask why. Independent Women’s Center for Better Health is grounded on a simple but radical premise: that health and health care are not the same thing.

Health is built primarily outside the clinic—in the food we eat and the exposures we face on a daily basis—and that a system oriented around treating diseases rather than fostering well-being has the wrong priorities.

The Center’s work spans both dimensions.

Our work on the formal healthcare system is focused on empowering patients through price transparency reforms, which can restore accountability and make care more affordable. Our broader health efforts address the nutritional and environmental factors that are essential for wellness. We start with a conviction that Americans deserve a healthcare system that serves people, not corporations, and stops treating medicine as a substitute for health.

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Areas of Work

Healthcare Price Transparency

Advancing enforceable price transparency rules to give patients and employers real information before care is delivered.

Affordability, Access & Market Reform

Addressing the structural features—site-neutral payments, scope-of-practice barriers, PBM opacity—that drive up costs without improving care.

The Roots of Chronic Disease

Examining how food policy, nutrition programs, and environmental exposures contribute to the chronic disease epidemic.

Overmedicalization & Patient Empowerment

Questioning whether an increasingly medicalized culture is making Americans healthier—or simply more diagnosed and more dependent.

Aging, Alzheimer’s & Long-Term Care

Addressing the policy gaps around early detection, access to emerging therapies, and sustainable care models for an aging population.

Vaccines & Public Health Trust

Making the case for a more targeted and transparent approach to public health guidance, and rebuilding the institutional credibility.

Innovation & the Future of Medicine

Evaluating how technology and regulatory reform can speed development of new, patient-centered treatments at lower costs.

Transparency:

The First Step to a Healthy America

Americans are told to make “healthy choices”—but too often, we aren’t given the full truth. From food labeling to medical prices, a lack of transparency keeps families in the dark and undermines trust in our system.

Learn More

Independent Women Special Report

The Cost Crisis in American Healthcare—and What to Do About It

American families are spending more on healthcare and getting less. IWF’s Reclaiming Affordability report tackles the affordability crisis across five areas where costs are hitting hardest—including a dedicated chapter on healthcare, examining the structural failures that drive up costs and the market-based reforms, including price transparency and portable benefits, that can put patients back in control.

Read the Report

A Case For Humility, Precision, and Parental Partnership

PAPER: Rethinking Vaccine Policy

This paper calls for a recalibration: One that protects the public from serious threats without overreaching in ways that fracture trust or deny children access to essential aspects of society.

Read

Myth + Fact

Myth.

Hospitals now post prices online, so patients can compare costs before care.

Hospitals are required to post prices, but most data is hard to find, inconsistent, and not patient-friendly. Key details like negotiated rates are often missing or unclear. “Posted” prices rarely reflect what patients actually pay.

Fact.

Real transparency means prices patients can actually use.

True price transparency requires clear, standardized data, real negotiated rates, and enforcement when hospitals don’t comply. Current rules are a start, but without accountability, patients still can’t reliably compare costs before care.

About the Center for Better Health

Subscribe to Updates from the Center for Better Health

Areas of Work

Transparency:

The First Step to a Healthy America

The Latest from the Center for Better Health

Independent Women Special Report

The Cost Crisis in American Healthcare—and What to Do About It

Experts

Director, Center for Better Health

Director, Center for AI and Technology

Visiting Fellow

Health Policy Fellow