Medicare Advantage (MA) growth continues but with continuing softness in Big MA
A quick blog to tell you about enrollment growth in Medicare Advantage (MA) from April 2025 to May 2025.
MA growth slowed down from 2024 to 2025 because of the financial woes of the MA industry. But the rolls are still growing due to aging and the popularity and value of MA compared with the archaic traditional Medicare (fee-for-service) program.
What do the latest statistics show?
Growth from January 2024 to February 2025 was 4.39% or 1.468 million. (I used February 2025 because of issues with the January 2025 statistics). Enrollment in MA reached 34.941M in February 2025. In May 2025, it reached 35.242M. MA enrollment grew about 80K from April to May and about 301K from February to May.
How did Big MA do?
From January 2024 to February 2025, Big MA (big national plans) enrollment performed very poorly because of retrenchment among some of these plans. Big MA grew by about 780K or 3.1%. Big MA enrollment hit 26.348M. This compares with about 688K growth for all other MA plans, or 8.7% and 8.953M in February 2025. Big MA’s penetration dropped from 76.4% in January 2024 to 75.4% in February 2025. Big MA has grown about 209K lives from February to May 2025, or about 70% of growth in that timeframe. This trails Big MA’s overall penetration considerably. Big MA growth in May was about 42K, with all other plans growing about 38K — almost half of growth.
United Healthcare grew by about 24K in May 2025 and about 162K since February. Humana grew by about 5K in May, but has contracted by about 24K since February. CVS grew by about 11K in May and about 33K since February. Kaiser grew by about 4K in May and 13K since February.
Centene dropped by about 9K in May and about 18K since February. Elevance Health was about flat in May but has shed about 29K since February.
In March, Cigna closed its sale of all of its Medicare assets, including its over 700K MA lives, to Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC). As such, HCSC jumped from about 239K in March to 957K in April. It is now the 7th largest MA player. It grew by about 5K in May.
Special Needs Plans chugging along
Special Needs Plans (SNPs) (including MMPs) continued to see a healthy increase in enrollment. From January 2024 to February 2025, SNPs grew to 7.553 million, a gain of about 646K or 9.35%. SNP enrollment grew about 264K in the enrollment season. But this growth is still down from the January 2023 to January 2024 period. In that period, SNPs added 1.154 million or 20.07%.
From February to May, SNPs added 143K more lives. From April to May, SNPs added about 55K. About 48% of all MA growth from February to May was SNP enrollment. SNPs took about 68% of growth in May.
PPOs vs. HMOs
Over the years, PPOs began growing and competing well with HMOs in terms of raw numbers as well as percentage growth. While PPOs’ sheer number and percentage growth was beating HMOs over the past several years, that trend changed from January 2024 to February 2025. From January 2023 to January 2024, HMOs grew about 853K (4.8%) and PPOs 1.861 million (14.8%). But from January 2024 to February 2025, HMOs grew more than PPOs in terms of numbers and percentage: HMOs up about 882K (4.7%) vs. PPOs up about 580K (4%). HMOs grew by about 480K during the enrollment season, while PPOs contracted by about 58K.
From February to May, HMOs grew by about 172K while PPOs grew by 127K. From April to May, HMOs grew by about 47K compared with 31K for PPOs.
#medicareadvantage #enrollment #cms #healthplans #coverage
— Marc S. Ryan
