We all know that good healthcare is priceless. Whether it is getting help for a sick child in the middle of the night, or a routine checkup that becomes anything but routine, we want the best when it comes to our health and the health of our loved ones.

Yet healthcare is not price-free. Americans are spending $1.9 trillion per year on healthcare. That amounts to 16 percent of the entire gross domestic product. By 2015, healthcare costs are projected to consume $3.5 trillion — 20 percent of the gross domestic product.

There is no place on the global economy’s leader board for a country spending that much on healthcare alone. The high cost of healthcare is also one of the main reasons why more than 45 million Americans lack health insurance.

We can do better.

We cannot solve all America’s healthcare problems overnight, but we can find ways to increase the quality of care while reducing costs. To do so, we need to do three things: People need to know how much their healthcare costs. They need to know the quality of the care they receive. And they need to have a reason to care. Right now, none of these things exist in our healthcare system.

Americans know the price of almost everything they pay for, except for one of the most important things they pay for — their healthcare. With a point and click, they can find the price of anything from clothes to cars. Yet they don’t know what they are paying for healthcare and what sort of quality to expect in return. There’s no Carmax for healthcare.

Yet people deserve to know, indeed they have a right to know, what their healthcare costs and how good it is. Patients should be able to go to an Internet site, type in the name of a common medical procedure and see the facilities in their area that provide it. They should also be able to see information about quality, examine a general rating of the facility or learn useful information like the number of patients who undergo that procedure at the facility each year.

At the same website, patients should also be able to see an estimate of the overall cost of the procedure, how much their insurer will pay and how much they will be expected to pay. That kind of information will allow patients to become informed consumers making informed choices about one of the most “priceless” things in life — their health.

To make this information available to patients, President Bush has asked purchasers to work with providers and payers to disclose information about prices for common, elective medical procedures. We in government can do the same. Government purchases some 46 percent of healthcare in America — a big part of the market.

But price is only part of the equation. Patients also need to know about the quality of care. We need the help of organizations that define quality standards so that we can begin to assign ratings to the quality of care patients receive. If a doctor or a hospital is not providing good quality, two people need to know that: the patient and the payer.

Health information technology is an essential tool in getting this information to the public. Secure electronic health records will allow the efficient gathering of anonymous data on price and quality, while giving consumers more control over their healthcare. That is one of the reasons the president has called for electronic health records for most Americans in the next decade.

To speed the adoption of health IT, we have formed a federal advisory panel, the American Health Information Community, to recommend common IT standards that all can adopt.

Once people gain better information, they become better consumers of healthcare, and that helps people get healthcare costs down. It’s the principle behind the president’s push for health savings accounts, or HSAs. Once people have information, HSAs give them the ability to act on it.

HSAs are savings accounts in which tax-free money can be deposited and used as needed or saved as desired. Those funds can be carried over from year to year. HSAs are more affordable for most families, and that increases accessibility to healthcare.

More than 3 million people have already signed up for HSAs, and 29 million are projected to do so by 2010. Forty percent of the people who bought HSAs have family incomes below $50,000. More than a third of those who bought HSAs on their own had previously been uninsured.

Our task is to reconcile the priceless value of good health with the soaring cost of healthcare. By making healthcare costs transparent and providing consumers with information about the quality of their care, we can help them get the best healthcare, at a price they can afford.

Leavitt is secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.