About: Iron Triangle of Health Care

The concept of the Iron Triangle of Health Care was first introduced in William Kissick’s book, Medicine’s Dilemmas: Infinite Needs Versus Finite Resources in 1994, describing three competing health care issues: access, quality, and cost containment. Each of the vertices represents identical priorities. Increasing or decreasing one results in changes to one or both of the other two. For example, a policy that increases access to health services would lower quality of health care and/or increase cost. The desired state of the triangle, high access and quality with low cost represents value in a health care system.