The 5 maps here show
that 2020 Medicare Advantage plan trends will vary widely from state to
state.....
1. Non-HMO Plans
HMOs once dominated this market. Non-HMOs' share
will rise to 62% in 2020, up 4% from this year. (California's increase came on
a small non-HMO plan base.)
2. Plans With No-
Deductible Drugs
About 63% of an average state's plans with drug
coverage will have a no-deductible tier in 2020. Green here means a state's
average is growing; red, shrinking.
3. Extra Drug Benefits
Plans can go beyond the standard Medicare drug
coverage benefits. About 91% will do that in 2020, up 1% from this year. Here,
green means richness is growing faster than average.
4 Average State Price
Index
Overall costs, including the deductibles, tend
to be lower in the South, and higher (here: greener) up North.
5. Changes in the
Average Price Index
Here, greener means the average is rising faster
than in other states, and light orange or red means the the average is falling.
Medicare program
managers at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have just flooded
the CMS website with two giant, computer-crashing files of 2020 Medicare
Advantage and Medicare Part D plan data.
The files show how
much each insurer’s plans will cost in each county, and they give some hints
about what the benefits will be like.
The total number of
plan entries has increased 18% this year, to about 58,000.
The database
includes all sorts of specialized plans and subsidized plans that might not be
the typical health insurance agent’s bread and butter. We filtered out a set of
tens of thousands of ordinary Medicare Advantage plans that provide drug
coverage.
The number of
ordinary, general-purpose Medicare Advantage health maintenance organization
(HMO), HMO point-of-service, preferred provider organization and private
fee-for-service plans that offer drug benefits increased 17% this year, to more
than 38,000.
We found that:
·
The annual 2020 average state cost index will range from a low
of $390, for plans Florida, up to a high of $1,517, for plans in Minnesota.
·
The average is about $749, down 6.1% from the 2018 average for
comparable plans.
We also looked
at the columns of data that show how strong, or weak, the benefits will be.
For a look at the
maps we created to go behind the national averages, see the map cards in
the slideshow above. (Hover over the first slide with your mouse or touchpad
pointer if the navigation arrows seem to have disappeared.)
How We Did This
To allow for
apples-to-apples comparisons between the 2019 numbers and the 2020 numbers, we
started by cutting out all of the Medicare Advantage plan entries for older
types of plans and niche plans, such as special needs plans.
Our comparisons
include only Medicare Advantage plans that provide drug coverage. We kept
Medicare Advantage private fee-for-service plans, point-of-service plans, and
preferred organization plans in the calculations.
To compensate
for the problem that a plan might keep its monthly out-of-pocket costs for the
enrollee low by making the deductibles high, we came up with our own, homegrown
plan cost index.
The cost index
equals 12 months of a Medicare Advantage plan’s health coverage and drug
coverage, premiums, plus the plan’s annual deductible.
Resources
The CMS 2020
Medicare Advantage plan files and other plan files are available here.
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