Reducing Health Care Costs: You Can’t Improve What You Don’t Measure

Gordon: I would like to talk a little bit about health care costs, and before that, though, could you give me a thumbnail sketch of what is the Milbank Memorial Fund?

Chris: Sure. We’re an operating foundation. That means we spend money on our own projects, as opposed to giving money away in grants. As you know, we’re almost 115-years old, and our origins are really in New York City, where we’re still based. When our founders started to be concerned about—stop me if you’ve heard this before—the living conditions of people who’d recently immigrated to the United States, in this case, the lower east side, who are living in settings of poor sanitation, inadequate running water, livestock in the street who were causing poor hygiene and, in some cases, dying.

And our founders started this rather radical idea of a philanthropy, a foundation—at the time, it was radical—to start adjusting those conditions. That led it to think about access to health care and starting what became what were precursors to community health centers. They got into the public health movement, upstate in Syracuse, and fast forward 80 years and you have the Fund here, which is really focused on working with public officials, primarily, at the state level, to improve the health of all populations.