Over the past few weeks, all five national, publicly traded health plans have hosted their fourth set of earnings calls for 2025, sharing their performance from Q4 and their 2026 outlook. We make it a point to stay on top of these players’ performance to monitor the health insurance industry’s overall financial position and to see what the data tell us about ongoing demographic shifts, the margin outlook for providers, the real-world and cost implications of innovations from

In our January post , we covered the structure of the ACCESS model—its four clinical tracks, its outcome-aligned payment (OAP) logic, and the questions that remained unanswered (chiefly, what the payment amounts are and what the improvement targets are) as applications opened. Well, we now have some answers. CMS just released 21 pages of more detail  about ACCESS model payments and targets for the first performance period (July 5, 2026-December 31, 2027). And on February 12,

After a couple of uneven years, healthcare dealmaking came back to life in 2025. By most measures, both deal volume and value are trending upward again—though still off the torrid pace of 2021, when cheap capital and a post‑pandemic spending spree sent valuations through the roof. At Union, we tend to read deal activity as one of the better directional cues for where healthcare is headed. When capital flows change course, market strategy usually isn’t far behind. And while th

Practically every organization in every sector of healthcare routinely needs market-sizing models to guide high-stakes strategic decisions, such as where to invest and where to be cautious. The problem: In the rush to check all the planning boxes, it is all too easy for leaders to accidentally end up with—and even bet the strategy on—'models' that are not really models at all, but simply numbers . Numbers with unexamined, opaque, and sometimes wildly inaccurate underlying as

January 2026 has slipped away like a Nor'easter through the Northeast—fast, furious, and leaving everyone wondering what just happened. And much like those of you who got snowed in, we've spent the month mostly indoors, heads down, reading everything we could get our hands on about the flurry of health industry and policy developments that have swept through Washington and across the healthcare landscape. Let's go around the horn and touch on just a sliver of what our team h

CMS announced the launch of the ACCESS (Advancing Chronic Care with Effective, Scalable Solutions) model, a 10-year voluntary payment model offering outcome-aligned payments (OAP) for tech-enabled management of certain major chronic conditions, in early December. For health system and digital health leaders, it stands out as both a market awareness-raising opportunity and a large-scale test of potential for OAP effectiveness—a logical follow-up to value-based payments. Fair

Ahead of our 2026 Revenue Cycle Summit in Chicago, we've been chatting with many executives and board members about how their health systems are transforming their operations for 2026. Interestingly, a common ambition seems to be on everyone's radar: squeezing more out of existing vendor arrangements . The questions many are pondering are flavors of: "Should we demand more from our current vendors or make wholesale changes?" And, while all types of vendors roll into this con

An Interview with Brendan Keeler, AKA 'Health API Guy' Over the next few years, we all need to be tracking a new and highly active front in Health IT innovation and change: The emergence of an “individual access layer” that lets patients control how their data moves across tools and apps—and all the related healthcare industry ecosystem opportunities and risks that come that new infrastructure. I’m talking about a new class of players, known as Individual Access Services (IA

We don't just write things at Union Healthcare Insight—we are voracious readers, too. Welcome to our first edition of "What we're reading," in which we go around the virtual corridors of Union HQ finding out what healthcare (or healthcare-related) news been catching the eyes of the research team and why it resonated with us. Read on for more. Healthcare (and related) news highlights from this week Brandon Aylward, Research Consultant What's an article that caught your eye in

Agentic AI in healthcare has rapidly become the centerpiece of health tech discussions. We’ve been studying it because it’s an area of rapid growth and advancement—an outlier in this moment in healthcare, when stakeholders across the industry are struggling amidst rising expenses, workforce shortages, and patient experience frustrations. Agentic AI tools are being positioned as a game-changing approach to addressing many of the industry’s biggest challenges, given their state

For years, vertical consolidation has been a mainstay of the insurer playbook—blending payer, provider, pharmacy, and PBM assets into a single, integrated ecosystem designed to drive synergies, provide consistent margin performance, and withstand turbulence to any one part of the business. It’s a strategy that worked remarkably well through the 2010s and early 2020s. We may be reaching a turning point. Recent financial results across all national players —but especially from

Few categories in modern medicine have captured the imagination of patients, physicians, and investors as quickly as GLP-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1s). Originally developed for diabetes management, these drugs, popularized under brand names such as Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, and Zepbound, are redefining how we think about obesity, metabolic health, and even chronic disease prevention. And increasingly, GLP-1s are no longer just about controlling blood sugar. They have become c