Contracts and Population by Ratings

For our first 2018 Stars factoid, we’re showing the number of contracts and membership by Star rating.  We can see that the number of contracts is starting to rise again after dropping for several years.  This reflects two competing trends - national companies consolidated their membership into higher rated contracts while more and more hospital systems are starting their own Medicare Advantage plans.  Some of these new plan struggles are showing up in a slight increase in the number of 2.5 star plans and the return of 2 star ratings.
 

For the 2018 which hasn’t started yet, we’re showing the 2017 population.  The drop of 1.3M members is artificial – the members are in contracts that are being discontinued, but they’ll will appear again in plans come January.  Undoubtedly, we’ll see most of them show up in 4 star contracts through another wave of consolidation.  This is a distortion – star ratings payments reflect prior year performance.  If you want to know how performance (rather than payment) is changing over time, you need to look at star ratings against the incurred population.  We’ll tackle that in a future factoid.