On March 23, 2025, we celebrated the 15th anniversary of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). In this post, CHIR experts reflect on how the law’s reforms affected people’s access to affordable, high quality health insurance, and what the next 15 years might bring.
Over the last two months, CHIR hosted a three-part webinar series about the corporate transformation of health care. Kennah Watts discusses some unanswered questions from the series relating to price caps, transparency, and rural hospitals, and highlights further CHIR resources on the subject.
In February we stayed out of the cold and bundled up with the latest in health policy research. We read about salary and utilization changes in hospitals acquired by private equity, challenges with price transparency requirements, and changes to hospital community benefit rules in Oregon.
High and rising healthcare costs in the U.S. are driven largely by escalating hospital prices, fueled by increasing consolidation among health systems. In a recent Issue Brief for the Milbank Memorial Fund, Sabrina Corlette and Karen Davenport discuss what states can do to enhance premium rate review programs, to ultimately curb provider price increases.
Private equity is not new to the health care sector, but recent growth in private equity investment has sparked a plethora of research studies, media attention, and political attention. A recent Congressional investigation and agency report, on top of continuing research indicate the time for policymakers to take action against private equity in health care is now.
Since the snow shows no sign of stopping, we might as well stay cozy inside and read up on the latest health policy research from January! This month we read about patient care after private equity acquisition of hospitals, and how to improve risk-adjustment accuracy in Medicare Advantage.
The No Surprises Act (NSA) has largely succeeded in protecting consumers from surprise medical bills by reducing out-of-network billing and establishing a dispute resolution process. However, while compliance has improved, challenges with the IDR process, legal actions, and incomplete data hinder a full assessment of its cost containment goals and effectiveness. CHIR experts Nadia Stovicek and Jack Hoadley discuss recent complaint data in their newest piece for CHIRblog.
The Biden administration has advanced several pro-competition reforms aimed at lowering health care costs and increasing consumer choice, an area of potential alignment with the incoming Trump administration. CHIR’s Kennah Watts discusses competition as a bipartisan policy and what the incoming Trump administration can do to support competitive markets and improve health care affordability.
In November, CHIR was thankful for the latest health policy research. We read about charity care provided by non-profit hospitals, Marketplace coverage for small business and self-employed workers, and out-of-pocket costs of traditional fee-for-service Medicare versus Medicare Advantage.
A new proposal in New York State seeks to reduce rising outpatient care costs by implementing site-neutral payment. The bill aims to cap payments, eliminate facility fees, and protect consumers from higher costs. In her latest article for CHIRblog, Karen Davenport breaks down this new proposal.
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.
