Health care providers won the vast majority of the fee disputes adjudicated through the No Surprises Act’s Independent Dispute Resolution process during the first half of 2025.
The volume of those disputes submitted to arbitration rose nearly 40 percent over the first half of 2024, to 1.2 million cases, and the victory rate of providers also rose, from 85 percent to 88 percent.Leading the way for providers were private equity-backed parties, with three such companies accounting for 44 percent of the disputes submitted during the first half of 2025 and ten of those companies filing nearly 70 percent of all cases.
Meanwhile, the entities responsible for conducting the reviews are getting better at their job, reducing the running backlog of cases and processing nearly 50 percent more cases than during the same period in 2024. One reason: they are getting better at identifying cases that are not eligible for the process – disputes that accounted for about 20 percent of submitted cases during the first half of 2025. That figure is declining, though, as both providers and insurers become more familiar with the process.
Learn more about how the Independent Dispute Resolution process unfolded during the first half of 2025 and how that compares with the same period the previous year from the Healthcare Dive article “No Surprises disputes increasing even as arbiters catch up, CMS says” and learn more about that process from the program’s CMS web page.