Arbital Health, a healthcare technology and actuarial leader that centralizes, measures, and adjudicates value-based care contracts at scale, announced its strategic partnership with Aligned Marketplace, an advanced primary care marketplace for self-insured employers. Arbital Health’s platform will enable Aligned Marketplace to support its advanced primary care model through better value-based contracting. Over the past year,…

About 89% of Medicare beneficiaries in 2024 lived in a county where at least half of beneficiaries were enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans sponsored by only one or two insurers, making the market share highly concentrated, according to a recent analysis. About 4% of beneficiaries lived in a county considered a very highly concentrated market,…

Employers plan to shift more health care plan costs to employees for the 2026 plan year, according to a survey by Mercer, which is part of Marsh McLennan, a global leader in risk, strategy, and people. Employers projected that average health benefit costs for the 2025 plan year will increase about 5.8% compared to costs…

Priority Health, a Michigan-based health plan serving more than 1.3 million members, and Group Health Cooperative of Eau Claire (the Cooperative), a community-based health plan in Wisconsin serving more than 61,000 members, announced plans for Priority Health to become the governing member of the Cooperative. The agreement with the Cooperative will make Priority Health a…

Elevance Health (Elevance) settled a class-action complaint alleging that its Anthem commercial health plans applied overly restrictive criteria to claims for residential behavioral health treatment. The plaintiffs alleged that the restrictive criteria violated federal mental health parity laws.  The plaintiffs also alleged that Anthem’s coverage focused on intervention for short-term crises, but not on medically…

Lyra Health, which provides mental health benefits for employers, acquired Bend Health Inc., which provides pediatric mental health care. Financial terms were not disclosed. According to the announcement, Lyra Health anticipates that the acquisition will enhance its pediatric and neurodiversity capabilities with more specialized providers, neuropsychological evaluations, and virtual intensive outpatient care to provide whole…

Throughout the U.S., as many as 760 rural hospitals are vulnerable to closure due to serious financial problems, and 314 of these rural hospitals are at immediate risk of closure due to the severity of financial problems, according to a report by the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform (CHQPR). The loss of a…

The total cost of care for the 5.6 million people in the United States living with dementia is estimated at $781 billion in 2025, and about 30% of the cost ($232 billion) is for medical and long-term care services. Another 30% of the total cost was for informal care provided by family and friends. About…

About half (49.7%) of all health care expenditures in the United States in 2022 were for people in the top 5% of the expenditure distribution, according to an analysis of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s Medical Expenditure Panel Survey Household Component (MEPS-HC). The top 1% of people ranked by their health care expenditures…

An average of $334 billion per year was spent across all payers to treat key diet-related conditions, such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and breast and colon cancers, among American adults aged 18 years and older in 2021 and 2022. The estimate is based on an analysis of data reported to the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey-Household…