(NPR) – A growing number of Americans find themselves in a similar pinch. In New York City, negotiations between UnitedHealthcare and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center missed a June 30 deadline, briefly leaving some patients in limbo until a deal was reached the next day. In North Carolina, Duke Health recently announced it could leave the Aetna network unless the insurance company agreed to pay more favorable rates to the health system. And the Frank family was nearly caught out-of-network previously, when a 2023 contract dispute between Anthem and a primary care group in Jefferson City, Missouri, prompted the couple to switch some providers to MU Health Care.

Indeed, 18% of non-federal hospitals experienced at least one documented case of public brinksmanship with an insurance company from June 2021 to May 2025, according to preliminary findings by Jason Buxbaum, a health policy researcher at the Brown University School of Health. Over the same period, 8% of hospitals ultimately went out-of-network with an insurer, at least for a time. (Read More)