This year was like a pitch-black roller-coaster ride for some payers.

Execs told Healthcare Brew at the end of 2024 they were planning for Medicare Advantage (MA) challenges in 2025 and were keeping their eyes on managing the costs of pricey specialty drugs.

What those providing government plans didn’t know was they’d kick off 2026 MA enrollment during a government shutdown. Nor did they all accurately predict just how much medical costs would rise in 2025. All that came while they faced a public reckoning and amped up their use of AI.

Healthcare Brew asked executives at leading insurance companies, plus outside experts, what they feel defined this turbulent year.

Amy Flaster, chief medical officer, the Cigna Group

In 2025, we advanced our commitment to improving health experiences for patients, their families, and the communities we serve. This guides much of our work and will continue into 2026 and beyond. We made progress on simplifying access to care—streamlining prior authorization, leveraging AI to connect people quickly to preventive services like flu shots, and enhancing digital tools that provide clear, personalized support and health navigation.

Here’s what insurance leaders had to say.—CC

This year saw a lot of changes to the healthcare industry with a new presidential administration coming in, and we were top of how that impacted hospitals, Big Pharma, payers, tech, and retailers.

Here’s what we had the most fun reporting in 2025.

How the Human Genome Project shaped modern medicine

This story was so fun to report because I got to learn about a topic I didn’t know much about (genomics) and talk to some of the people directly involved in the Human Genome Project. I had no idea how many healthcare innovations had stemmed from the project and how much potential there is for genomics to advance healthcare in the future.—MA

See all our favorites here.—NO

CRISPR‑Cas9, a gene-editing tool originally part of bacterial immune defense, has been used for everything from a “de-extinction” of dire wolves to the creation of human-compatible pig organs to the controversial—and illegal—birth of gene-edited babies.

In 2023, the FDA approved the first-ever CRISPR-based medicine, exagamglogene autotemcel (brand name Casgevy), to treat sickle cell anemia. Beyond that, there are dozens of gene-editing trials that use CRISPR in treatments for other conditions like chronic Hepatitis B, lymphoma, and urinary tract infections.

All this happened relatively quickly after researchers Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, who submitted the first CRISPR patent in 2012, published a landmark paper that same year describing how clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPRs) and CRISPR-associated Protein 9 could be repurposed as “programmable DNA scissors,” kickstarting a genetic revolution.

“It’s really a ‘before and after’ in the history of humankind,” Isabel Esain Garcia, a postdoctoral researcher in Doudna’s lab at the University of California, Berkeley, told Healthcare Brew. “I definitely think that the future is going to be CRISPR-based clinical [applications].”

But while this technology has catapulted medicine and research forward, the rollout of CRISPR-based therapies—the technique’s most high-stakes application—remains complex. The next frontier is not just what CRISPR can do, but how to get it efficiently and equitably to patients.

Deep dive into CRISPR.—CC