Every September, the same cycle repeats: financial sites, insurance blogs and social posts start publishing “2027 Medicare costs” roundups weeks before Medicare itself has said anything official about next year’s numbers. This year is no different, and it means a lot of people planning around a 2027 Medicare Advantage premium or Part D deductible right…

Mary Washington Healthcare and Humana spent most of the summer locked in a contract standoff that put tens of thousands of Medicare Advantage members in the Fredericksburg, Virginia area on notice: keep your doctors, or lose your in-network coverage on September 1. Some patients didn’t wait to find out how it ended. They canceled appointments…

The Villages Health System LLC, the doctor group that treats residents of The Villages, Florida, has agreed to pay $541.5 million to resolve claims that it submitted false diagnosis codes to inflate its Medicare Advantage payments. The deal, announced by the Justice Department on August 26, 2026, is one of the largest Medicare Advantage billing…

Medicare Advantage commercials have spent years promising enrollees hundreds of dollars a year for groceries, produce or a home utility bill. What the ads rarely mention is that the money isn’t available to everyone who signs up. It is reserved for enrollees who meet a chronic-illness definition that each insurer writes for itself, and until…

A running count kept by Becker’s Hospital Review now shows 29 health systems that have ended, or are actively ending, a contract with a Medicare Advantage insurer at some point in 2026, up from 25 just weeks earlier. For the roughly half of Medicare enrollees who have chosen an Advantage plan over Original Medicare, that…

Molina Healthcare says it will drop its traditional Medicare Advantage prescription drug plans starting with the 2027 plan year, walking away from a product line that brings in roughly $1 billion a year in premiums. The insurer disclosed the move inside its own fourth-quarter 2025 earnings report, framing it as a strategic pivot rather than…

Genesis HealthCare System, the main hospital network serving Zanesville and Muskingum County, Ohio, has sent termination notices to four health insurers, telling them their contracts will end on January 1, 2027, unless the companies agree to new terms. The system says the move follows two years of rising claim denials and payment takebacks for care…

Starting October 1, insurance agents and brokers selling Medicare Advantage and Part D plans will no longer have to wait 48 hours after a beneficiary signs a permission form before pitching them specific coverage, and educational meetings can flow directly into sales appointments in the same room. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services finalized…

A peer-reviewed study published in JAMA in February 2026 found that the share of Medicare Advantage enrollees forced out of their health plan jumped to 10 percent nationally heading into this year’s coverage, roughly ten times the historical average. In 12 states, more than one in five Medicare Advantage members had no choice in the…

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has finalized a rule that strips 11 measures out of the scoring system used to rate Medicare Advantage and Medicare Part D prescription drug plans on quality. The agency says the measures it dropped were focused on administrative processes and areas where nearly every plan already scores about…