2024 Star Ratings Turmoil Creates Huge Vulnerability for Medicare Advantage Plans
While the Medicare Advantage (MA) Star Program has always made it difficult for plans to achieve and maintain high Star scores, the Star roller coaster ride has been much more profound over the past several years. We now have had two years of pretty bad news, which puts a blemish on the program (fair or not). What’s more, the percentage of high-scoring contracts and the percentage of enrollment in them are now below pre-COVID years. To refresh a bit on this, during the COVID pandemic, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) created fairly major calculation allowances for both Star 2021 (2019 and 2020 data) and 2022 (2020 and 2021 data). These allowances had the effect of boosting Star scores. We saw a surge in Star scores in 2022, including for plans that historically did not have a great track record of consistently hitting 4 Stars and above. However,
