It might seem like health insurance companies’ top priority lately is to shrink Medicare Advantage (MA) member numbers, but that’s not the full story.

UnitedHealthcare, Elevance, and CVS’s Aetna all expect lower MA enrollment for 2026 after upping plan prices, reducing benefits, and pulling business out of some areas in response to sky-high medical costs and shrinking margins. Other major payers like Cigna have left MA altogether. (Though Humana unexpectedly grew its MA footprint.)

But even as companies shrink MA as a whole, they’re still going all-in on one particular type: the special needs plan (SNP), which is meant for sicker patients who need extra coverage and benefits.

SNPs accounted for 21% of all MA enrollees and half of the total growth in MA from 2024 to 2025, per a September KFF report. The majority of SNP enrollees—more than 4 out of 5—are in dual-eligible SNPs (D-SNPs), a plan for people eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid.

Are SNPs the new insurer fave?—CC

Two health industry institutions whose collaborations date back to the 1940s are teaming up on a project for a new era.

Merck and Mayo Clinic announced an agreement today that will allow the drug giant to tap the health system’s genomic and clinical data for AI and advanced analytics in drug discovery and development. The orgs claim the partnership marks Mayo’s first deal of this scale with a pharma company.

The partnership hinges on the Mayo Clinic Platform, which offers data from the US hospital and its international partners, like lab results, medical imaging, clinical notes, and molecular data.

“[Mayo has] a really unique wealth of de-identified clinical, molecular multimodal data sets, and these are not readily available in the healthcare landscape, at least in a really clean and highly curated way,” Greg Hersch, Merck’s SVP of enterprise strategy and venture, told Healthcare Brew.

Here’s what the partnership entails.—PK

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About 25 years ago, when Kimberly Powell was studying electrical engineering at Northeastern University, she took an internship with a medical imaging company that was working to build more technology into radiology.

She worked closely with radiologists and saw their work change when updated imaging equipment provided closer looks into patients’ medical issues. The problem was the company was building its own graphics cards, a computer system that processes image data (and is the major backbone of AI).

So she called up tech company Nvidia to ask to use its technology because around that time Nvidia was moving from computer graphics into accelerated computing, which requires specialized software to compute.

“They said, ‘We have early evidence that healthcare is going to be a great user of this technology, but we don’t know how,’” Powell said. Then they asked her: “Would you like to join the company and help us figure that out?”

Powell, now VP of healthcare with Nvidia, sat down with Healthcare Brew at the JPM Healthcare Conference in San Francisco on Jan. 13 to share what the company has accomplished in the healthcare industry over the last 17 years and where she thinks innovation is moving.

See the full conversation here.—CM