Featured Insight
From insurer to diversified services business
by Michael Cuello, Mar 30, 2021
Large health insurers no longer just provide coverage, but are instead repositioning themselves as vertically integrated healthcare organizations that span the care continuum. The graphic below…
From insurer to diversified services business
Large health insurers no longer just provide coverage, but are instead repositioning themselves as vertically integrated healthcare organizations that span the care continuum. The graphic below shows five-year total revenue growth…
Selling Medicaid expansion to the holdout states
The American Rescue Plan stimulus package just sweetened the deal for the twelve holdout states that haven’t yet expanded Medicaid. In exchange for expanding eligibility to the roughly four million…
A year later, consumer confidence is returning
After a rollercoaster year of living with COVID-19, consumer confidence has returned—and remained largely stable during the winter surge of the pandemic, according to the latest data from a Healthgrades’…
Health systems falling further behind the industry in size
Even though signs point to a post-COVID spike in health system mergers, retailers, insurers, and other healthcare industry players already far exceed health system scale. Even the largest of the…
Disparities may worsen as vaccine eligibility widens
Early data on vaccine distribution by race and ethnicity show a mismatch between those population groups receiving the vaccine, and those that have been hardest hit by the pandemic. As…
Payers double down on lucrative MA market
As the oft-cited 10,000 Baby Boomers continue to age into Medicare each day, Medicare Advantage (MA) enrollment keeps accelerating. The graphic below highlights growth in the MA ranks across the…
A look at the broader Biden healthcare agenda
Beyond the initiatives directly tied to COVID relief (as discussed above), President Biden’s healthcare agenda includes a broader bolstering of the protections and coverage mechanisms in the Affordable Care Act…
Did the CARES Act rescue hospital margins?
Despite taking a huge volume hit in Q2, most hospitals have managed to maintain positive operating margins—largely thanks to a $100B cash infusion from the federal government via the Coronavirus…
What’s at stake in the ACA case
Since the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was signed into law a little more than a decade ago, it has fundamentally reshaped the American healthcare system. As the graphic below highlights,…
Approaching a “new normal” for healthcare volumes?
Eight months into COVID-19, national healthcare volumes are still lagging pre-pandemic levels. The graphic below shows highlights from Strata Decision Technology’s recent analysis of volume data from 275 hospitals nationwide between March…
