On April 30, 2026, the Hopkins Business of Health Initiative hosted Medicare Advantage: Rethinking Payer-Provider Relationships to Advance Health, a Johns Hopkins University Nexus Symposium at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C.
More than 100 leaders from CMS, Congress, plans, providers, and academia spent the day working through one question: how should the relationship between Medicare Advantage payers and providers change to better serve patients, beneficiaries, and taxpayers? The program now enrolls 54% of Medicare beneficiaries and is absorbing the most significant payment recalibration in its 20-year history.
The symposium was made possible through a Johns Hopkins Nexus Award, and reflected the kind of work the Hopkins Bloomberg Center was designed to host: bringing scholars, practitioners, and policymakers into the same room to advance ideas that have practical consequences for the country.
A working day on Medicare Advantage
"How do we rethink the way health care works? Not incrementally, but fundamentally," said Daniel Polsky, director of the Hopkins Business of Health Initiative and Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Health Economics. "That's the question HBHI was built around. This symposium gave us a day to work on it with the people who run, regulate, and study Medicare Advantage in the same room."
The agenda brought together academics, payer leadership, provider executives, policymakers, and innovators across six sessions: morning panels examining the research on payer-provider integration, a reactor panel widening the fiscal lens, a keynote address from CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, a lightning round of design proposals from former government and industry leaders, and a closing session on the legislative outlook for Medicare Advantage in 2026.
The afternoon's lightning round gathered six innovators, including the country's first U.S. Chief Technology Officer, with structured table debates engaging every attendee.
A purpose-built convening
The Hopkins Bloomberg Center, which opened in 2023 at 555 Pennsylvania Avenue, carries the tagline Where Discovery Meets Democracy. The MA Symposium reflected that vision in practice. Faculty across all four Hopkins schools represented in HBHI's work (the Carey Business School, the Bloomberg School of Public Health, the School of Nursing, and the School of Medicine) convened with senior agency staff, Hill staff from both chambers, plan and provider executives, and academic researchers from Brown, Vanderbilt, Harvard, and Hopkins.
Some audience members said afterward that the day's most striking feature was not any one panel, but who was in the room at the same time.
"This is the work HBHI is here to do," Polsky said, "and this was the right room to do it in."
Stay tuned
HBHI will continue to share insights from the symposium throughout the summer. To receive updates, subscribe to our newsletter.
Event resources
Symposium planning committee
- Melinda Buntin, PhD, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, Johns Hopkins University
- Liz Fowler, PhD, JD, Distinguished Scholar, Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health
- Paul Jacobs, PhD, Director of Modeling, Center for Health Systems and Policy Modeling, Johns Hopkins University
- Dan Polsky, PhD, Director of the Hopkins Business of Health Initiative and Bloomberg Distinguished Professor, Johns Hopkins University
- Amit Jain, MD, MBA, Vice President of Care Transformation, Johns Hopkins Health System
- Kali Thomas, PhD, MA, Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Professor of Aging and Community Health, Johns Hopkins University
