ICYMI: STAT News: “How a Texas couple is getting rich off out-of-network medical bills”

Mar 18, 2026 | Arbitration, Blog Post

HaloMD has emerged as one of the leading companies abusing and misusing the No Surprises Act, and a new investigation from STAT News details how the company and its founders have developed a playbook for securing lucrative payouts from the arbitration process, also known as Independent Dispute Resolution (IDR). From flooding the IDR process with costly, ineligible claims to operating shadow neuromonitoring services, HaloMD is compounding the health care affordability crisis facing millions of Americans.

Key highlights from the investigation are below (emphasis added):

  • “HaloMD is dominating this [IDR] process, which was set up under a 2020 federal law that bans surprise billing by out-of-network providers. It filed more arbitration cases than any other company in the first half of 2025 and boasts that it pulls in over $1 billion a year for itself and its clients.”
  • “It’s hardly the only company using the law to its advantage, but HaloMD is blowing past larger, more established groups doing similar work. Together, they’re eroding the law’s goal of protecting people from higher health care costs.”
  • “HaloMD’s strategy works like this, according to lawsuits from health insurers: It floods the overburdened federal arbitration system with thousands of disputes, many of them ineligible, and demands much more money than providers had originally charged. Disputes aren’t eligible if they should go through state arbitration, if the patients are covered by Medicare and Medicaid, or if the parties didn’t negotiate beforehand.”
  • “This new tactic is possibly even more lucrative for providers than surprise billing was, said Chris Whaley, an associate professor of health services, policy, and practice at Brown University. ‘If you were balance-billing patients, you had to chase money down from patients,’ Whaley said. ‘Now, you have a means to get that money directly from insurers.’”
  • “HaloMD isn’t just filing more disputes, it also wins much bigger payouts. Providers won over four times their typical in-network rates for services in arbitration in 2024, federal data show. HaloMD’s payouts were over nine times that rate.”

You can read the full article from STAT News here. For more on how HaloMD and IDR middlemen are exploiting the IDR process, click here.