A federal program built to keep Medicare drug plan premiums from swinging wildly is being shut down, and CMS made the announcement in the same release where it published a 2027 figure that’s easy to mistake for an actual bill. The program is the Part D Premium Stabilization Demonstration; the figure is the $41.33 “base…

Becker’s Hospital Review counted 29 health systems that have dropped or are set to drop Medicare Advantage contracts in 2026, an update the trade publication posted on September 4. The number matters less as a single statistic than as a signal: providers and insurers are still fighting over Medicare Advantage terms well into the year,…

On July 28, 2026, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services made two announcements at once: the technical numbers that will set every 2027 Medicare Part D premium, and the end of a subsidy that has quietly held those premiums down for the past two years. The subsidy went to insurers running stand-alone prescription drug…

A retiree filling a shingles vaccine prescription in January might expect to pay full price until a fresh annual deductible is met. That is not how Medicare Part D actually works. Since January 2023, the program’s yearly drug deductible has skipped over two specific categories of medication entirely, and CMS has just finished writing that…

Millions of Medicare Advantage enrollees now get a plastic debit card loaded with an allowance for things like groceries, over-the-counter items, or utility bills, part of the supplemental benefits plans use to compete for members. Those cards have also become a magnet for confusion and, according to federal regulators, outright misuse. Starting in 2027, Medicare…

If you take prescription drugs on Medicare, you may already have noticed that the dreaded “donut hole,” the coverage gap where your costs used to jump, has quietly stopped hitting your wallet the way it once did. That’s not an accident, and it isn’t going away. Starting with the plan year that opens January 1,…

Every Medicare Advantage and Part D plan gets a public quality score each year, from one to five stars, and that score does more than help shoppers compare options. It also decides how much extra federal money a plan collects. Federal regulators had spent several years developing a new piece of that scoring formula meant…

Every fall, headlines announce the average Medicare Advantage or Part D premium for the coming year, usually sometime in September. It’s easy to assume that means you can go online that same week and see exactly what your own 2027 plan options will cost. You can’t. The number that makes headlines in September is a…

Long before any Medicare Advantage member gets a letter about their plan disappearing, the insurer running that plan has already told the federal government its decision. Federal regulation requires a Medicare Advantage organization to notify the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in writing by the first Monday in June if it won’t renew its…

No drug on Medicare’s newly negotiated price list cost the program more in 2024 than the trio of Ozempic, Rybelsus and Wegovy. All three are versions of the same active ingredient, semaglutide, sold by Novo Nordisk under different brand names for different uses. Together they were dispensed to about 2.28 million people with Medicare Part…