Vlada
2026-10-05 · on LinkedIn ↗
Before 2025, no insurer dropped more than 300,000 Medicare Advantage members in a year. Since then, three have done it eight times.
Before 2025, no insurer dropped more than 300,000 Medicare Advantage members in a year. Since then, three have done it eight times.
We went back through every CMS plan crosswalk since 2009. Each year some plans stop being offered in a county. The insurer can move those members into another of its plans, or the members lose their plan and have to pick a new one.
For 16 years, that stayed small. The worst year for any insurer was Humana in 2011, when 298,062 people lost their plan.
Then it changed. CVS Health dropped 515,000 members for 2025, 402,000 for 2026 and 305,000 for 2027. UnitedHealth dropped 611,000 for 2026 and 514,000 for 2027. Humana dropped 575,000 for 2025 and 605,000 for 2027.
What happens to you depends on your insurer as much as your plan. For 2027, UnitedHealth moved 862,000 members into another of its plans. CVS moved 23,000.
These are individual plans. Employer group plans are not in these numbers.
If your plan is leaving, your insurer should already have written to you. You choose a new plan in open enrollment, October 15 to December 7.
Every insurer, county and year is in our MCP: vladahealth.com/data-access
You picked a plan. Your insurer picked whether you keep one.
- Source
- CMS Plan Crosswalks 2009-2027, CMS Medicare Advantage Landscape files, CMS Monthly Enrollment by Contract/Plan/State/County (September); tools/ma_brain/payer_exits_figure.py; payer_series.csv and buckets_2027.csv beside this file.
- Measure
- Members in September of year Y in an individual Medicare Advantage plan (plan IDs 001-799, Cost plans excluded) whose plan was not offered in their county in plan year Y+1, split by the CMS plan crosswalk: moved = crosswalked into a plan offered in their county; lost = stranded by a service-area reduction or terminated. Insurer = parent organization in CMS enrollment mapped through medicare_semantic.dim_parent_alias_v1 as of September of Y (acquired companies counted from the takeover date). Plan years 2009-2026 from the plan exits ledger cells (s3 medicare/ma_brain/exit_history); 2027 from medicare_semantic.fact_landscape_disposition_v1 on the same every-member basis.