Burwell: Health care on threshold of big change

The health care system in the United States is on the threshold of changing the course of the nation and what happens now “can impact the life of every American more than any piece of policy or legislation we have seen in the recent past,” Sylvia Mathews Burwell, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, said Wednesday.

Using data, we have “the opportunity to transform our health care system in unprecedented ways,” she said at the Health Datapalooza conference in Washington. “We have a vision of a better system and making that system a reality is one of the most important challenges of our time. The thing about making history is we don’t know it’s happening until we are in the middle of it and solutions don’t seem possible until they are.”