Ohio’s Medicare Advantage market is losing 32 plans between one plan year and the next. The state’s fact sheet from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services lists 180 plans available for 2027, down from 212 in 2026, a cut of about 15% and the second-largest in the country behind Florida.
Ohio’s fact sheet: 212 plans in 2026, 180 in 2027
The number sits in the Ohio page of CMS’s 2027 Medicare Advantage and Part D landscape fact sheets, published Sept. 28. The wording is plain: 180 Medicare Advantage plans are available in 2027, compared with 212 in 2026. Only Florida, where the count falls from 611 to 560, loses more, and the ranking comes from comparing every state’s row rather than from a CMS table.
The word “available” carries the scope. The sheet counts plans that can be sold somewhere in Ohio, not plans in every county, and not the plans any one household can actually enroll in. A carrier that trims a plan in three rural counties and keeps it in Columbus can shave the state count while a Columbus resident notices nothing at all.
A lower average premium on a shorter list
The same page reports that Ohio’s average monthly Medicare Advantage premium moves from $12.12 in 2026 to $9.00 in 2027, a drop of $3.12. Set beside the national weighted average of $12.00 that CMS gave in its Sept. 28 announcement, Ohio’s average lands below the country’s.
Two cautions apply. The fact sheet does not say how the state average is weighted, while the national figure is described as enrollment-weighted, so the two are not strictly like for like. And an average across plans is not the price of any one plan. Plans priced at $0 a month pull an average down without changing what a higher-premium plan charges the people enrolled in it, and the sheet gives one average rather than a spread.
By percentage, Ohio’s cut is nearly double Florida’s
Raw counts flatter the biggest state. Florida’s 51 missing plans are about 8% of the 611 it had in 2026, while Ohio’s 32 are about 15% of 212. Illinois, third on the list at 21 fewer plans, lost 13% of its 157. Measured against what was on offer a year earlier, Ohio’s cut is the deepest of the three, which is the fairer way to judge how much narrower the menu has become for a resident of the state.
The percentages come from dividing the sheet’s own counts, and they carry the same limit as the counts themselves. They describe the state’s plan menu in aggregate. How many of the 32 removed plans were small, sparsely enrolled or sold in only a handful of counties is not something the fact sheet reveals, and a carrier’s decision to consolidate two similar plans into one would register in the count the same way as a full exit.
2,630,753 people, and what that number is
The Ohio sheet opens with the population behind the numbers: 2,630,753 individuals enrolled in Medicare in the state. That is total Medicare enrollment, Original Medicare included, and not the count of people in Medicare Advantage. Nothing on the sheet says how many of the 2,630,753 belong to a plan that is being dropped or reshaped.
That gap is why a 32-plan cut is best read as a change in the menu rather than a headcount of disruption. Nationally, Elizabeth Casolo wrote in Becker’s Hospital Review that roughly 80% of current beneficiaries can keep their plan at the same or a lower premium, and that 99% will have access to at least one Medicare Advantage option. Those are national projections, and CMS’s Ohio sheet does not break them out by state.
Where the 32 plans could matter to a household
A shorter menu narrows the fallback. A member whose plan disappears at year-end has a smaller set of same-county substitutes, and the ones remaining may not include the same doctors, the same hospital system or the same drug tiers. A member whose plan stays may still face a different network or formulary, since plan counts say nothing about either.
The timing follows the standard calendar. Medicare.gov gives Open Enrollment as Oct. 15 through Dec. 7, with changes effective Jan. 1 and a rule that the plan must receive an enrollment request by Dec. 7.
The sheet leaves several decisions to a member’s own paperwork. Whether a doctor stays in network, whether a drug remains on the formulary and at what tier, and whether a plan’s extra benefits survive are set plan by plan and show up in each plan’s own notice. The Ohio page cannot answer them, and neither can a state count. What it does establish is scale: a menu that was 212 plans long is 180 plans long, and the shortening is deeper in proportion than in Florida or Illinois.
The Ohio row itself reads: 180 Medicare Advantage plans available in 2027, 212 in 2026, an average monthly premium moving from $12.12 to $9.00, and 2,630,753 people enrolled in Medicare in the state, according to CMS.
Ohio’s 32 lost plans leave a shorter list to compare
Ohio’s 2027 fact sheet shows 180 Medicare Advantage plans available, down 32 from 212, so a member whose plan is among those changing has fewer alternatives to weigh. The count does not show which counties or networks lost coverage, or what the remaining plans would cost for a given set of drugs and doctors.
The 2027 Medicare Open Enrollment Decision Kit includes a prescription-by-plan comparison and a provider call script that test each drug and doctor against each plan under consideration.
Open The 2027 Medicare Open Enrollment Decision Kit to check each drug and doctor by plan →
This article was written with AI assistance and its figures were checked against the CMS Ohio fact sheet.
