Payers

Shannon May, Photos: Adobe Stock

Health insurers largely beat expectations and upped their full-year profit guidance in their Q2 2026 earnings calls.

It’s an improvement from last year, which saw several payers like Centene, Elevance Health, and UnitedHealthcare fall below expectations or lower their financial outlook after medical costs were higher than expected.

Insurers attribute their improved performance to strategies like market exits, benefit reductions, and premium increases. Still, uncertainty looms large due to persistently high medical costs, enrollment drops, a sicker risk pool, and policy changes. Payers said they expect more premium increases and market exits for 2027.“The No. 1 influence on increasing premiums is the increase in the underlying cost of healthcare,” Matthew McGough, a policy analyst at research nonprofit KFF’s Program on the ACA, told Healthcare Brew.

Get the rest of the story here.—CC

      

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Payers

Monica Soni

Affordable Care Act (ACA) marketplace enrollment fell in 2026 for the first time in seven years.

As of February 2026, about 19.2 million people had ACA exchange plans, down from 22.1 million last year, according to federal data. Others stayed on the marketplace but switched to cheaper bronze-tier plans with higher out-of-pocket costs.

This shift has been attributed to changes such as premium spikes, the expiration of enhanced premium tax credits, and, according to the Trump administration, a crackdown on fraud.

States that run their own marketplaces and offer state-funded subsidies, like California, generally experienced lower enrollment drops than others, according to KFF, a nonprofit that conducts health policy research.

Still, though, in 2026, California’s official health insurance marketplace, Covered California, saw enrollment decrease by 7% to an estimated 1.8 million people in February 2026, down from 1.9+ million in February 2025, according to an April 16 report.

We talked to Monica Soni, chief medical officer at Covered California, about these enrollment changes and how they may impact the broader healthcare industry.

Check out the interview here.—CC

      

Tech

Getty Images

Welcome back to AI 411, a monthly roundup of tech announcements from across the healthcare industry.

Big tech dominated this month. On July 22, Nvidia released a new open-source simulator called the Nvidia Medical Physics Simulation framework. It’s a digital space where surgical robots can be designed and tested to see how the robots move, touch, or interact with other items before reaching physical spaces.

Here’s the rest of your July rundown on AI.—CM

      

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vital signs

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top healthcare reads.

Stat: 2.3%. That’s how much the rate for Medicare payments to inpatient hospitals will rise in 2027. (Healthcare Dive)

Quote: “They’re just suspending the funds, and then shifting over to the states the burden to come in and prove that they’ve done everything possible to eliminate what the federal government said is fraud, but they haven’t shown much by way of proof of that. That part of it, I think, is new, and that’s what is so troubling.”—Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond in Virginia, on the federal government’s withholding of Medicaid funds to Minnesota and California (the Guardian)

Read: A plan to convert rural hospitals to emergency centers may not be enough to preserve access to rural healthcare. (KFF Health News)

Elevance Health

Behavioral health is shifting from crisis response to prevention. Here’s how value-based care is driving better outcomes—and lower costs.

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