About 600,000 people are about to get a letter that changes their health coverage. That is roughly 8% of the 7.2 million members enrolled in Humana’s Medicare Advantage plans, and the company is walking away from their plans for 2027. It is the second year running that Humana has pruned its lineup, and for the households caught in the cut, the practical question is simple: what replaces the plan that is going away, and how much will it cost.
What Humana said on its July 29 earnings call
Humana’s chief financial officer, Celeste Mellet, laid out the plan for investors during the company’s second-quarter earnings call on July 29, 2026. The insurer will exit Medicare Advantage plans covering roughly 8% of its membership for the 2027 plan year, a move first detailed in trade coverage from Becker’s Payer. On a base of 7.2 million Medicare Advantage members, that share works out to about 600,000 people who will need to choose something new before their current coverage ends.
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Why this is a second straight year of exits
The 2027 cuts are not a one-off. Humana ran a similar exercise for 2025, dropping plans that were losing money or falling short on quality, and the 2027 decision follows the same logic. The company has told investors it recaptured roughly 40% of the members affected by its 2025 exits into its other Humana plans, and it expects a comparable recapture rate this time, according to reporting from Healthcare Finance News. In plain terms, Humana expects to keep a little under half of the affected members by moving them to a different Humana plan, while the rest will shop across the wider market or land with a competitor.
For a member, “recaptured” is not the same as “kept whole.” Even a member who stays with Humana on a replacement plan can see a different premium, a different drug formulary, a different provider network, and different copays. The name on the card may not change, but the fine print underneath it can.
The plans on the chopping block tend to be lower-rated
Most of the plans Humana is exiting are rated 3.5 stars or lower for the 2027 bonus year. Medicare’s five-star quality system matters to insurers because plans rated 4 stars and above earn federal bonus payments that fund richer benefits; plans stuck below that line are harder to run profitably. Cutting the weakest-rated plans is part of a broader margin-recovery push at Humana, which has told investors it is aiming for a pre-tax margin of at least 3% by 2028. That corporate target is the engine behind the coverage change landing in members’ mailboxes.
The takeaway for a household is that a plan being discontinued is not necessarily a plan that was serving them well. A lower-star plan may have had narrower networks or weaker customer service to begin with. The disruption is real, but it can also be a prompt to compare what else is available rather than simply accepting the first replacement offered.
Watch the mailbox for the Annual Notice of Change
The document that spells out exactly what is happening to a specific plan is the Annual Notice of Change, and plans are required to send it out by late September. Anyone whose Humana plan is being discontinued should get a notice explaining that the plan is ending and what the options are. That letter is easy to mistake for junk mail, so it is worth opening every envelope from an insurer this time of year. If a plan is ending and a member does nothing, they risk being left without the coverage they were counting on.
The window to pick new coverage is Oct 15 to Dec 7
The fix runs through Medicare’s annual Open Enrollment period, which runs from October 15 to December 7, with new coverage starting January 1. During that window, a member can switch to another Medicare Advantage plan or move back to Original Medicare and add a standalone drug plan, as the federal government explains in its guide to joining a plan. Members losing a plan involuntarily may also qualify for a special enrollment period that extends their window, but the cleanest path is to act during the standard dates rather than gamble on an exception.
The money angle is concrete. Comparing plans means checking three things at once: the monthly premium, whether current doctors and hospitals are in the new network, and whether current prescriptions are covered and at what copay. A plan that looks cheaper on premium can cost more overall if a regular medication moves to a higher tier or a longtime doctor falls out of network. With 600,000 people forced to choose, the households that come out ahead will be the ones who treat the change as a reason to shop, not just a form to sign.
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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