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The financial challenges facing hospitals and health systems—from the One Big Beautiful Bill’s looming impacts to difficult operating conditions—are also keeping insurers up at night.

By effectively putting strategy into action, hospitals and healthcare systems can thrive amid today’s financial and operational challenges and position themselves to confront the looming threats that are just around the corner.

The challenges that hospitals and health systems currently face are amplifying this complexity, from uncertainty about potential changes to federal healthcare policy—including Medicaid and NIH funding cuts and tariffs—inflation, and ongoing workforce challenges.

The hospital and health system leaders we work with are extremely concerned about the financial impact their organizations may experience from potentially significant Medicaid policy changes, following the recent passage of a budget resolution by the U.S. House of Representatives.

A conversation with Rich Liekweg, CEO of BJC Health System in Missouri, and Nick Barto, president of BJC Health System

The latest Kaufman Hall Report includes highlights from the 35th annual Healthcare Leadership Conference, which featured high-level thinking and reflection on how our industry’s ongoing transformation will progress into the future.

Health systems are faced with two conflicting realities. The first is that partnerships will continue to be a necessary and critical part of healthcare strategy. The second is that antitrust enforcement will continue to create strong barriers to these same partnerships.

Health system leaders focused on the day-to-day needs of their organization can sometimes lose sight of key developments in other sectors of healthcare. But in an interconnected healthcare ecosystem, understanding the trendlines their payer counterparts are facing is an essential task.

In a roundtable discussion, Kaufman Hall Managing Directors Matthew Bates and Nora Kelly and Senior Vice President Max Timm discuss the rise of risk-based contracting in value-based healthcare arrangements, what providers and insurers need to watch out for, and what success in risk-based contracting will look like.

For more than a decade, hospitals, payers, and other healthcare stakeholders have experimented with moving healthcare payment from fee-for-service, volume-based contracts to arrangements that reward providers for the value of the care they provide.

A university explores partnerships as a middle ground between its current state and a cost reduction effort that would eliminate programs and services.