Reports Summarize Managed Care Study Results from Brown University (Litigating the No Surprises Act: How Legal Challenges Undermined Cost Containment and Reshaped Provider Payments): Managed Care

2026 OCT 22 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Health Policy and Law Daily -- Researchers detail new data in Managed Care. According to news reporting from Providence, Rhode Island, by NewsRx journalists, research stated, “The No Surprises Act (NSA), signed into law by President Trump over five years ago, marked a significant federal intervention aimed at shielding millions of consumers with private health coverage from unexpected out-of-network medical bills. While the Act is lauded for successfully protecting consumers, its implementation has been plagued by aggressive litigation, with provider-led lawsuits challenging the Act itself as well as every rule issued to implement the protections and countless other lawsuits challenging actions (or inactions) by providers, insurers, and independent dispute resolution (IDR) entities.”

Financial support for this research came from Arnold Ventures.

The news correspondents obtained a quote from the research from Brown University, “This litigation has profoundly impacted the Act’s cost-saving objectives by eroding its payment methodology and fostering extensive use of the IDR process. This paper chronicles the litigation timeline from the passage of the NSA through April 2026 and its impacts on the implementation, detailing the challenges to the regulatory framework and how adversarial legalism shaped the NSA’s trajectory.”

According to the news reporters, the research concluded: “The paper concludes by offering policy options for Congress, federal agencies, states, and stakeholders to reduce costs and IDR volume to better align with the intent of the NSA.”

This research has been peer-reviewed.

For more information on this research see: Litigating the No Surprises Act: How Legal Challenges Undermined Cost Containment and Reshaped Provider Payments. Health Economics Policy and Law, 2026. Health Economics Policy and Law can be contacted at: Cambridge Univ Press, Edinburgh Bldg, Shaftesbury Rd, CB2 8RU Cambridge, England.

Our news journalists report that additional information may be obtained by contacting Lindsey Murtagh, Brown University, School of Public Health, Hlth Serv Policy & Practice, Providence, RI 02912, United States. Additional authors for this research include Ayesha Rahim and Erin Fuse Brown.

The direct object identifier (DOI) for that additional information is: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1744133126100723. This DOI is a link to an online electronic document that is either free or for purchase, and can be your direct source for a journal article and its citation.

(Our reports deliver fact-based news of research and discoveries from around the world.)