In August, 16 U.S. Senators asked CHIR to review health insurers’ filings to state regulators supporting their 2026 rate requests. Drawing on an analysis of 178 Marketplace plan filings, CHIR examines the double-digit premium increases many insurers are proposing for 2026.
Marketplace enrollees are facing threats to their health coverage and healthcare affordability as a result of the recently enacted budget reconciliation bill. CHIR expert Karen Davenport discusses the impending expiration of enhanced premium tax credits, which would drastically compound the coverage losses of H.R. 1 for American consumers.
The first of numerous federal policies that reverse recent coverage gains under the the Affordable Care Act are scheduled to go into effect on August 25, but two lawsuits have been filed to block them. CHIR’s Sabrina Corlette reviews the imminent policy changes, their impact, and the legal challenges to watch.
In May, the Departments of Health and Human Services, Labor, and the Treasury announced several actions to enhance health care price transparency. In her latest piece for Health Affairs Forefront, Stacey Pogue discusses how these actions mark the start of a process to make hospital and health plan price transparency data more accessible and useful.
IDR entities have come to play an instrumental role in OON payments, but entities’ determinations and decision-making practices lack transparency. In their latest piece for Health Affairs Forefront, Kennah Watts and Jack Hoadley analyze variation IDR entities’ decision-making patterns and discuss the implications for the IDR process.
President Trump’s signature on H.R. 1, the budget reconciliation bill, will lead to upwards of 17 million people losing their health insurance and millions more with higher barriers to accessing care. At CHIR, we’ll be working to minimize the law’s harms, document its effects, and partner with those seeking to reverse its worst abuses.
Dental coverage offered through the ACA Marketplaces is constantly changing. Building on CHIR’s 2024 analysis of enrollment, premiums, and insurer participation in stand-alone dental plans (SADPs), this new interactive map allows users to dive deeper into state-level data.
While the independent dispute resolution (IDR) process is intended to lead to fair outcomes for out-of-network payment, new analysis demonstrates unexpectedly high use of the IDR process, mostly by private-equity-backed providers that win often and win large. In their latest piece for Health Affairs Forefront, Jack Hoadley, Kennah Watts, and Zachary Baron illustrate trends in the IDR process and explore implications for costs.
The U.S. House of Representatives’ Ways & Means Health Subcommittee recently held a hearing about ways to advance digital health technologies. CHIR expert Sabrina Corlette was one of the invited panelists, warning the committee that, while these new technologies hold promise, consumers can only benefit from them if they have access to affordable, high quality health insurance.
This year, insurers are setting their rates for 2026 while Congress and the administration weigh several policies that are projected to cause premiums to spike and the number of people with Marketplace coverage to plummet. In a new blog, CHIR experts investigate early 2026 rate filings and related analysis to explore how insurers are responding to an array of anticipated federal ACA policy changes and uncertainty around them.
The opinions expressed here are solely those of the individual blog post authors and do not represent the views of Georgetown University, the Center on Health Insurance Reforms, any organization that the author is affiliated with, or the opinions of any other author who publishes on this blog.
