Who were the winners and losers in Tucson Medicare Advantage enrollment from 2016 to 2017?
Each year at this time, I look at Medicare Advantage enrollment data provided on the CMS website (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services). Below I compare plan enrollment numbers from February 2016 to March 2017 to see who added enrollments and who lost enrollments.
Tucson Medicare Advantage Enrollment as of March 2017
Tucson Medicare Advantage Enrollment
Medisun is actually Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona Advantage. The number of people enrolled in their Pima County plan increased 19% over the last year.
Health Net now has two contracts to follow as it looks like their new Ruby Plus plan is under Health Net Community Solutions of Arizona. This new plan got 1,476 enrollments, but I was told by a Health Net rep that most of those enrollments were people moving from other Health Net plans to the new plan which has lower co-pays and some additional benefits. While the old Health Net plans are down 40%, if you add the new contract enrollments, Health Net is only down 11% year-to-year.
Pacificare of Colorado is actually the AARP Medicare Complete HMO plan (in Pima County AZ). This plan has been around for a long time – since Pacificare was bought by United many years ago.
UnitedHealthcare of Wisconsin is the AARP Medicare Complete HMO POS plan (in Pima County AZ). This plan has been losing enrollments because it has a premium and higher co-pays than most other plans.
Caremore had a 4% increase in enrollments while Humana added only three people to its HMO plan.
Cigna….poor Cigna. They came blazing into Tucson as the new guy in town for 2016 and then got sanctioned by CMS. CMS audits Medicare Advantage plan and looks at complaints and process problems, and I guess Cigna-Healthspring had a few.
It’s been a year since CMS told Cigna they could not enroll new members until all the problems were resolved. I wonder when the sanction will end for Cigna? In the meantime, 38% of the folks who enrolled with Cigna for 2016 moved to another plan for 2017.
If you are into details, you can look at the CMS spreadsheet for every Medicare Advantage contract in the country. They are sorted by state and then by county.
If you want to see last year’s numbers, look here: Medicare Enrollment in Tucson as of February 2016.
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