Health insurers today will tell a "Make America Healthy Again" summit that they're partners in efforts to make patients healthier and health care more affordable, not the political boogeymen President Trump and others have made them out to be.

Why it matters: Health plans are responding to bipartisan anger over coverage costs by making inroads with a historically hostile crowd.

Driving the news: Executives with UnitedHealth, Elevance and the industry trade group AHIP are due to participate in a panel discussion with a top Medicare official at an annual gathering of MAHA faithful at Washington's Waldorf Astoria hotel.

• Elevance plans to announce new billing policies designed to clarify the setting where patients are receiving care, to ensure that services are paid at the correct rate.
• The announcement dovetails with growing bipartisan interest by the federal government in paying the same rates for the same services, regardless of where they're performed.
• UnitedHealth plans to highlight how health plans can place more emphasis on preventive care and long-term health, instead of waiting to treat patients when they're sick.

The big picture: Health insurers are in hot water with both political parties.

• Congressional candidates have been vowing to take on powerful health interests and make care more affordable, casting insurers alongside pharmaceutical companies as culprits responsible for ever-rising prices.
• Many in the MAHA movement are deeply skeptical of the health care establishment — and convinced that government regulators have been looking out for the powerful interests.
• But the insurers are trying to flip the script and pitch themselves as allies on some key priorities.

"The content on the panel is designed to show overlapping interest between the public and private payers," one source familiar with the event planning said.

• That includes alignment with the administration on addressing waste, fraud and abuse and the MAHA movement's focus on "nutrition, food and ... [Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s] leadership on highlighting whole health and moving beyond a sick care system," the source said.
• "AHIP welcomes opportunities to engage in dialogue about how to reduce the incidence of chronic disease and make health care more affordable and accessible for Americans," said spokesperson Chris Bond.

Details: Elevance's new policies, shared first with Axios, are "intended to address increasingly common situations where care provided at [a hospital's] off-campus location is billed at a higher hospital rate," according to the company's press release.

• The insurer will require hospitals to identify the physical location where care was provided, check billing information against hospital addresses to confirm where care took place, and pay certain off-campus hospital services at the appropriate rate.
• The policies will apply across Elevance's commercial, Medicare Advantage and Medicaid plans.
• "When the same service costs more because a hospital owns a doctor's office or clinic, workers and families are saddled with higher premiums and cost sharing," said James Gelfand, CEO of the ERISA Industry Committee, in a statement. "This kind of innovation should become the norm."

What they're saying: "It's hard to really understand why a commercial insurer should be paying more for the exact same service to be done in a hospital versus a doctor's office," said Loren Adler, a fellow and associate director at the Brookings Institution's Center on Health Policy.

• But "I don't have a great sense why they didn't do this earlier," he added.
• Though the policy will have a downward effect on prices, Adler said, "the magnitude is unlikely to be terribly large."

Between the lines: Insurers' presence at a tentpole MAHA event hasn't been welcomed by all members of the movement.

• Robert Malone, a former member of Kennedy's handpicked vaccine advisory panel, wrote on his Substack that he was "genuinely taken aback" by a who's who of corporate interests on the summit agenda.
• "We all thought MAHA was founded to challenge entrenched interests," he wrote. It "has somehow convened a panel on medical affordability dominated by the insurance industry itself, while the physicians and patients who live under that system have been completely excluded from the discussion," Malone wrote in a post titled "The Capture of MAHA."
• "MAHA was supposed to expose the revolving door between money, industry and government, not build its own," he added.

The bottom line: If there's anything almost everyone at the conference can agree on today, it's the need to confront today's problems to stave off momentum for Medicare for All.

• That, if anything, creates an odd-bedfellows alliance between conservatives and insurers that's likely to endure, despite the populist campaign rhetoric.

About one-quarter of hospital executives say they're performing fewer medical procedures due to the expiration of Affordable Care Act enhanced subsidies, and that the industry effects could be more widespread in six to 12 months.

Why it matters: Hospitals are facing a make-or-break year due to changes to the ACA marketplaces and Medicaid and have to make big decisions about technology investments and what services they provide before the biggest effects hit in 2027.

Driving the news: 24% of hospital executives surveyed by Evercore ISI this month said that they've begun to see ACA cuts have an effect on demand for procedures.

• The most commonly affected include hips and knees, heart procedures, and endoscopies and colonoscopies.
• 56% expressed caution about the subsidy expiration having an impact in six to 12 months.
• Asked about future spending, 36% still plan on normal budgeting, while an equal proportion are waiting to determine impacts before releasing budgets. 28% intend to push back some spending to next year.
• That's a marked change from when Evercore ISI asked the question during the second quarter of this year and 56% said they would have no change in spending.

Evercore ISI polled 25 executives at hospitals with more than 150 beds from Sept. 8–17.

Context: Congress let the enhanced ACA subsidies expire on Dec. 31, resulting in deep coverage losses in some states and a rise in uncompensated care. The Trump administration attributes the drop-off to improper or fraudulent sign-ups by "phantom enrollees."

• Individuals with household incomes above 400% of the federal poverty level now have to pay the full cost of a marketplace plan.
• That appears to be too much for some individuals, who are either opting to go uninsured or delaying care.

No one procedure has been substantially impacted, and the hospital officials said demand for spinal procedures and ablation for irregular heartbeats was unaffected.