VeriStat: Premiums on the Medicare Advantage Market

June 4, 2019 By vericred 

In this VeriStat series, we are exploring the Medicare Advantage market. In our last post, we showed that there is widespread availability of Medicare Advantage plans and that most shoppers can choose between plans offered by a range of insurance carriers. In this post, we examine premiums on the Medicare Advantage market.

The data science team at Vericred analyzed premiums for Medicare Advantage plans available to those shopping as individuals.* The results show that there are a large number of plans available at a comparable price to Original Medicare. More than half of Medicare Advantage plans do not charge an additional health premium, and nearly half do not charge a drug premium. Taking into account the counties where plans are offered, 95% of the over-65 population in the United States has access to at least one plan that includes drug coverage and has both zero health and zero drug premiums. Of the plans that do charge additional premiums, the majority of health and drug premiums are each under $50 per month.

We showed in our last post that there is a large amount of competition on the Medicare Advantage market. Our premium analysis shows that— perhaps because of this competition— premiums on the Medicare Advantage market are generally low. There is widespread availability of zero premium plans, and nearly all older adults have access to at least one of them. In our next post, we will examine Medicare Advantage plan benefits to see how these vary and how they differ from Original Medicare.

*For this post we excluded plans offered only to groups and those with special eligibility criteria.

VeriStat: County-Level Analysis of Medicare Advantage Plan Availability

https://vericred.com/insights/blog/veristat-premiums-on-the-medicare-advantage-market/