Transparency

States are increasingly taking action to contain rising health care costs. In this blog, CHIR expert...

On May 19, Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms (CHIR) hosted an event discu...

To combat rising costs without burdening employees, state health plans are leveraging their unique m...

The recently signed Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2026 includes a provision on unique national ...

On Thursday, January 29, 2026, Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reform...

On November 20, 2024, the Georgetown Center on Health Insurance Reforms hosted a policy briefing to ...

A new report from the Center on Health Insurance Reforms, supported by Arnold Ventures, examines how state employee health plans (SEHPs) in five states—California, Kansas, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Utah—access and utilize claims and price transparency data to improve affordability for their employees.

While the No Surprises Act does not protect consumers from ground ambulance surprise bills, this blog post highlights the five states that have recently acted in 2025 to protect consumers with state-regulated plans and explores the various state approaches to payment methodologies, service scopes, enforcement, and consumer protections.

This brief explores policy opportunities such as price regulation, competition, transparency, and enforcement reforms to improve health care affordability.

Through a collection of fact-sheets on hospital payment streams, various designations, and key sources of information, this guide offers a starting point to understand the organizational and financial differences across hospitals in the United States. This document provides key questions to ask a hospital – about ownership, type of care, location, type of patients, teaching status, and alternative payment – the answers to which can help better understand the regulations under which a hospital operates, the funding streams it may have available, and other factors that influence its business practices and financial status. This document overviews key terms, concepts, and measures related to hospital revenue from three payment types: Medicare, Medicaid, and commercial insurance. This series of fact sheets describe how a hospital’s organization form influences its business and financial operations, eligibility for federal programs, and level of government oversight and public reporting requirements. This series of fact sheets overviews subsection (d) hospitals (“general acute care hospitals”) and Medicare-recognized specialty hospitals, explains how these hospitals are treated under Medicare and 340B, and provides descriptive statistics for each hospital type. This series of fact sheets explain how a hospital’s location influences how and what it gets paid by Medicare, as well as explains how each type of rural hospital is treated under Medicare and 340B, and provides descriptive statistics for each rural hospital type. This series of fact sheets describe how “safety-net hospitals” – Medicare and Medicaid disproportionate share hospitals (DSH) and 340B hospitals – quality and are paid under their respective federal programs, and provides descriptive statistics for each program. This series of fact sheets define graduate medical education and describe U.S. teaching hospitals with key descriptive statistics on institutional characteristics. This series of fact sheets defines the goals of alternative payment models and describes the Medicare Shared Savings Program as well as a range of Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services Innovation Center models. This document identifies key sources for understanding an individual hospital’s ownership, regulatory and payment classification, and its financial, operational, and quality performance beyond what is covered in the What to Ask (About) a Hospital guide.