Six hundred thousand is the figure Humana attached to its 2027 Medicare Advantage plan exits, roughly 8 percent of the nearly 7.2 million people it covers in the program. A second number sits underneath it and has drawn far less attention. The company has told investors it anticipates recapturing roughly 40 percent of that group into other plans it sells, which is a very different thing from keeping them covered.
What the 600,000 Figure Counts, and How the Plans Were Chosen
The exits are not spread evenly across the book. Humana is dropping what its chief financial officer described as the lower tail of profitability and return, and protecting plans with deeper value-based care arrangements, where the company shares financial risk with physician groups. The majority of the plans being exited carry star ratings of 3.5 or lower for the 2027 bonus year, though executives said star ratings were not the primary driver of which plans went.
Roughly 600,000 members are enrolled in the plans coming out, about 8 percent of Humana’s Medicare Advantage membership, according to reporting on the July 29 earnings call. Those members are not losing Medicare. They are losing the specific plan they are enrolled in, effective at the end of the 2026 plan year.
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The 40 Percent Is a Rate Borrowed From 2025
Humana has done this before, recently and at scale. It shed roughly 500,000 members in 2025 while exiting unprofitable plans and counties, and recaptured just over 40 percent of the affected members into other plans it offers. Chief Financial Officer Celeste Mellet told analysts to expect something similar this time. “We will work to recapture a significant portion of that volume as we did in 2025,” Mellet said on the call.
Applied to 600,000, a similar rate would put roughly 240,000 people back inside Humana and leave roughly 360,000 shopping elsewhere. That arithmetic is not a company forecast. It is a prior year’s result carried forward, which is exactly how the expectation was framed, and the actual outcome will not be known until enrollment closes and the 2027 plan year begins.
Recapture Is a Sales Target, Not a Transfer
Nothing about a recapture is automatic. A member whose plan is discontinued is not rolled into a replacement Humana plan by default. The 40 percent describes how many people the company’s sales and retention operation expects to persuade during open enrollment, which turns a corporate metric into a decision each household has to make on its own.
The replacement plan offered is also not required to resemble the one being retired, and it carries no guarantee of being the strongest option in that county. Premiums, provider networks, drug formularies and out-of-pocket maximums all reset with the switch. A member being steered toward a different Humana plan is being offered one candidate out of a full county menu, and the only way to know whether it is the right one is to check the doctors and the prescriptions against every plan available.
Shrinking After Adding More Than a Million Members
The pullback follows a year of unusual growth. Humana added more than a million Medicare Advantage members for 2026 coverage even while offering plans in three fewer states and 194 fewer counties than the year before, largely because it held benefits steadier than competitors that were cutting. Individual Medicare Advantage membership rose approximately 1,204,000, or 23 percent, in the first half of 2026 alone.
Volume of that kind does not repair a margin. In its prepared management remarks filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission the morning of the call, the company wrote that it expects its approach to 2027 individual Medicare Advantage bids to drive meaningful progress against its commitment of returning to a sustainable pre-tax margin of at least 3 percent in 2028. Cutting the least profitable end of the membership is the mechanism.
September Notices, the December 7 Deadline, and the Window That Opens December 8
Members in a discontinued plan receive written notice by mail in the fall, and that notice states the exact dates that apply to them. Medicare’s Open Enrollment runs October 15 through December 7, and a plan selected in that window takes effect January 1, provided the plan receives the request by December 7.
A plan that is not renewed also opens a second door that closes much later. Medicare grants a special enrollment period when a Medicare Advantage plan’s contract with Medicare is not renewed, running from December 8 through the last day of February the following year. A member who does not join another Medicare Advantage plan before the old one ends is enrolled in Original Medicare, which leaves drug coverage to be arranged separately.
Humana’s own filing states the tradeoff without softening it: the 2027 bid approach is meant to deliver meaningful progress toward a sustainable pre-tax margin of at least 3 percent in 2028. The 600,000 figure is what that approach costs on the membership side. The 40 percent is how much of it the company expects to sell back.
This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by a human editor. Figures are linked to their primary sources; where a claim could not be verified from the public record, we say so.
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