While elected officials in Washington are rightly focused on the approaching “fiscal cliff,” there is plenty of evidence that health care reform needs to be revisited. The law, passed in 2010, dramatically expanded health care access, but did little to control costs.

In the past week, news reports have told of rapidly rising drug costs, double-digit health insurance premium increases and the abuse of electronic medical record technology by doctors and hospitals to overcharge Medicare.

While Washington is talking about possible solutions to avoid the economic damage of the fiscal cliff’s combination of tax increases and deep government spending cuts, there are troubling developments with health care costs. President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats generally suggest that the health care crisis was taken care of with the passage of the health care reform law, known as the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

A report released this week found that prices on popular brand-name drugs increased at a rate six times higher than general inflation. A study by Specialty Scripts, the large pharmacy benefits manager, revealed that prices for the most widely used brand-name prescription drugs rose 13.3 percent from September 2011 to September 2012.

There was good news in the drug price report, however — generic drug prices fell by about 21 percent during the same period.

Increased use of generic drugs is a positive sign for controlling drug prices, but the big jump in specialty drug prices is cause for concern.

Another cause for concern came from California this week as the state’s largest for-profit health insurer, Anthem Blue, filed a request to raise health insurance premiums on 630,000 individual policyholders by 18 percent. Other Anthem customers could see their health insurance rates jump by 25 percent early next year.

Aetna, the nation’s third-largest health insurer, says it wants to raise rates by 19 percent for 70,000 customers in California, suggesting that health insurance costs weren’t solved by the health care reform law.

A third recent development in rising health care costs is linked to the implementation of electronic medical records, a technology that advocates for the ACA law said would reduce health care costs. Instead, audits of medical records have found that some hospitals appear to be using the technology to fraudulently increase their billings to Medicare.

The reports, by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, found that some doctors and hospitals, particularly in primary care and emergency departments, were using electronic medical records technology to boost billings without actually providing additional care. The report blames the ease of “cloning” a patient’s treatment records to another patient and using a simple tap on a tablet screen to change a billing code to a higher reimbursement for the apparent abuses.

The evidence of bogus coding to increase hospital income by millions of dollars has resulted in warnings that such actions will be investigated and treated as fraud by the U.S. Department of Health and the Justice Department.

The fiscal cliff might deserve national attention now, but when it comes to controlling costs, health care reform in the United States is clearly unfinished business.