As state policymakers grapple with rising commercial health care prices, they showed a growing interest during 2025 legislative sessions in leveraging ownership transparency as a tool to understand health care markets, strengthen oversight efforts, and inform consumers. Stacey Pogue discusses what states are doing to increase ownership transparency, and how other states may follow.
The recently enacted federal budget law is set to significantly roll back health insurance coverage for millions. CHIR experts Billy Dering, Amy Killelea and Christine Monahan discuss what this means for people with insulin-requiring diabetes.
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.
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.
While Indiana lawmakers have been working to reduce health care costs for commercial health insurance for more than a decade, Indiana’s 125th Legislative Session was particularly productive. CHIR experts explore Indiana’s efforts to improve health care affordability, and discuss how this could serve as an example for other states.
In May, we welcomed spring blooms and warm weather, while staying engaged with the latest health policy research. This month we read about potential effects of the reconciliation bill on provider revenue and uncompensated care, Rhode Island’s affordability standards and their effects on hospital prices, and coverage retention and plan switching following changes in premiums.
The proposed Marketplace Integrity rule and House-passed budget bill purportedly aim to curb ACA fraud but overlook basic steps to address broker misconduct. CHIR experts explain how these policies increase barriers for eligible enrollees without improving oversight of unethical brokers or implementing common-sense reforms.
One of the first actions by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services under the Trump administration was to make extreme cuts in funding for Navigators. In a blog post for the Commonwealth Fund, CHIR’s Rachel Swindle, Jalisa Clark, and Justin Giovannelli dispute the rationale behind the funding cuts presented by the Trump administration and highlight the gravity of reducing the Navigator program and outreach and enrollment assistance.
As U.S. health care spending continues to spiral higher, states are using a variety of tools to push back. In a new book of essays, CHIR experts examine the impacts and limitations of three mechanisms through which states are leveraging their role as a contractor to lower health care prices in the private health insurance market and to advance broader policy goals.
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.
