Becker’s Hospital Review runs a tracker that follows hospitals and health systems ending some or all of their Medicare Advantage contracts, and the number on it keeps climbing. Earlier this month it stood at 25 systems. As of August 31, it reads 28. This isn’t a one-time report — it’s a page Becker’s rewrites in place as new exits are confirmed, so a number an ordinary reader saw a month ago is already stale. For a retiree, the stakes are practical: if your hospital or your doctor’s health system is one of the ones on that list, the Medicare Advantage plan you’re paying for may no longer cover your usual care the way it did last year.
A Tracker That Keeps Getting Revised Upward
The page carrying the count still lives at a web address built around the number 16, even though the headline and body have since been rewritten twice — first to 25 systems, then to 28. Becker’s own editor’s note calls the list “not an exhaustive list,” an important caveat: it counts the contract breaks the outlet has been able to confirm and document, built from hospital announcements, insurer filings and its own reporting, not a government registry of every network change in the country.
Becker’s has tracked hospital exits from Medicare Advantage since 2023, and the running total has grown in each full year the outlet has published it. The 2026 list started in the mid-teens and has been revised upward several times since, most recently to 28 systems as of August 31, with roughly four months still left before most of the affected 2027 coverage decisions are made.
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Why Hospitals and Insurers Are Breaking Off These Contracts
Becker’s frames the split both ways. Providers dropping plans most often point to prior authorization denials and slow reimbursement; in other cases, insurers are the ones ending the contract. Both complaints show up in federal oversight data. A Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General report issued in June 2026 found that 19 Medicare Advantage organizations reviewed denied 12 percent of requests for skilled nursing facility admission, with individual plan denial rates ranging from under 1 percent to 23 percent.
The same report found that when patients or their doctors appealed those skilled nursing facility denials, the plans reversed themselves 95 percent of the time — a pattern OIG said raises concerns that some enrollees were initially denied care they were entitled to. That gap between an initial denial and a near-automatic reversal on appeal is exactly the kind of friction hospital finance departments cite when a contract isn’t renewed.
More Than Half of Medicare Beneficiaries Now Have an Advantage Plan
The reason the exit count matters beyond the hospitals involved is how large Medicare Advantage has become. Research from KFF puts 2026 enrollment at 35.2 million people out of 64.2 million Medicare beneficiaries with both Part A and Part B coverage — 55 percent of eligible beneficiaries, up from 19 percent in 2007. A network change that would have touched a small slice of Medicare enrollees two decades ago now touches the majority of them.
What Losing In-Network Status Can Cost a Retiree
The financial risk isn’t hypothetical. A Medicare.gov fact sheet on provider networks spells out what happens when a hospital or doctor leaves a plan’s network: in HMO plans, non-emergency out-of-network care typically isn’t covered at all; in PPO plans, it’s covered but at a higher cost to the patient. The same fact sheet notes a plan “must protect you from interruptions in medical care,” but the network itself can still change at any time during the year.
Plans are supposed to give advance warning. Medicare’s guidance says a plan should make “a good faith effort” to give at least 30 days’ notice before a regularly used provider leaves its network. That’s a real protection, but it also means a household can be a month away from learning that the hospital it counts on is no longer covered the way it used to be.
Checking Your Own Plan Before the Enrollment Window Closes
The window to act on this information is narrow and fixed. Medicare’s annual Open Enrollment period runs October 15 through December 7 each year, and it’s the one stretch when anyone with Medicare can switch Medicare Advantage plans, drop one for Original Medicare, or move to a different Advantage plan for coverage that starts January 1. Checking whether a hospital or doctor is still in-network takes a phone call to the plan or a look at its current provider directory — worth doing before enrollment closes rather than after a bill arrives.
It’s worth checking again even after enrollment ends. Becker’s tracker has been revised upward repeatedly through 2026, and the same Medicare fact sheet that describes the 30-day notice rule is explicit that a plan’s network “can add or remove providers… at any time during the year” — which is exactly how a list that read 25 in early August read 28 by the end of the month.
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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