Employers can fix America's healthcare problems without new technology or federal policy changes.

I recently watched a video on the CEO of Safeway describing about how they revolutionized their healthcare policy. It's a little dated, but the premise is sound.

http://coe.berkeley.edu/static/streaming/gtl-conference/2009/recording-part-1.html
(It's somewhere past the hour mark)

In short, most employers have been seeing around an 8.5% annual growth in health care costs, but Safeway's has been flat despite providing quality service. They do this by actively encouraging their employees to adopt healthier habits. Their policy is founded on some great principles:

1. Insure everyone: Everyone is covered, regardless of pre-existing conditions. It's still cheaper to provide preventative care to higher risk individuals than to treat them after a serious health issue arises. 
2. Create personal responsibility: Safeway had weight-loss competitions within stores, with thousands of employees competing. Within one year, they managed to move 7% of their total employees out of the "obesity category."  
3. Reward healthy behavior with financial incentives: Employees who don't smoke get an extra $300 of credit, which goes to their retirement account. Not obese? +$300. Don't have high blood pressure, hypertension, high cholesterol? Same deal.
4. Pay for results, not service - Safeway does a survey of prices and picks a fair (usually close to the median) amount they'd cover. Employees can choose to go to any hospital they want and Safeway would subsidize the procedure by the predefined amount.

You don't need new technology to drastically improve healthcare. You don't even need policy change. The fundamental goal of healthcare spending is to make people healthier, and doing so would reduce the need to spend on healthcare. I bet that employers can collectively cut $500B/year in healthcare costs within 5 years simply by being proactive about making their employees healthier. That's a quick 3% of GDP that can be better spent elsewhere.