Top Providers of Medicare Advantage, Drug Coverage Listed
- With the Affordable Care Act’s open enrollment just around the corner, more consumer than ever before are looking to get coverage, some for the first time. Industry experts are advising individuals to comparison shop to make sure they get the best coverage for themselves and their families.
There are currently over 50 million Americans enrolled in Medicare coverage, each one with different health needs and priorities. This makes finding the right coverage just as important as finding the most cost effective. To help during this process, U.S. News and World Report announced its list of the 2015 Best Medicare Plans. The list is designed to be a resource for medicare beneficiaries and their families during open enrollment.
“Finding a Medicare plan that meets an individual’s specific needs is a daunting task,” Ben Harder, managing editor and director of health care analysis for U.S. News said in a press release. “By giving consumers more information to work with, we hope to make picking a plan or changing coverage an easier process.”
U.S. News evaluated all insurance companies and their plans that are offered in every state to create the Best Medicare Advantage Plans and Best Medicare Part D Plans lists. This year, the company also increased the cutoff criteria for providers to be named to the Best Part D Honor Roll. For this highest honor, an insurance company is required to receive an average of 4.5 or better across all plans in a given state.
It uses data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), including a rating for each Medicare Advantage plan. To make the U.S. News list, Medicare Advantage plans available in a given state had to earn an average rating of at least 4.5 out of 5 stars, and all its plans in the state had to earn at least 3 stars. This is done to ensure that companies on the “Best” list maintain consistent quality across all plans.
For Medicare Part D plans the methodology was slightly different. Again CMS data was used and the 2015 star ratings were grouped by company and within each state and then averaged each company’s ratings in that state. To make the U.S. list, the plans available in a given state need to average 4.5 out of 5 stars and all plans need to earn at least 3 stars.
This year, U.S. News also added a new rating systems as it calculated a 1 to 5 star rating for each Medicare plan along specific dimensions dubbed “Wellness Care” and “Customer Service.” Two themes were used to track this data which were (1) tracking existing members health and (2) basic customer service aspects.
