Tara Bannow covers hospitals, providers, and insurers. You can reach Tara on Signal at tarabannow.70.
A federal judge has tossed one of the four pending civil lawsuits against HaloMD, a company that represents providers in No Surprises Act arbitration cases.
The ruling, which grants HaloMD’s motion to dismiss, represents a major win for the Texas-based middleman, which quickly rose to become the number one user of the federal arbitration process in the first half of 2025. The judge found that Anthem Blue Cross of California’s lawsuit failed to establish a legal basis for invalidating HaloMD’s arbitration wins against the company.
Lawsuits from four Blue Cross Blue Shield plans alleged that many of the disputes in which HaloMD prevailed weren’t actually eligible for arbitration. The lawsuits claimed to reveal a costly side effect of the process: Providers could potentially game the system to extract more money from health insurers for out-of-network services than they got before the surprise billing law passed.
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