For skilled nursing facilities, disenrollment creates abrupt payer transitions mid-stay – disrupting authorization processes, coverage continuity, and care coordination.
Providers in high-exposure states – where 40% or more of MA enrollees must re-enroll – should review their payer mix and prepare for coverage transitions that may send patients back to traditional Medicare.
Forced Disenrollments Among Medicare Advantage Beneficiaries Following 2026 Plan Exits
Every year over the last 2 decades, the share of Medicare beneficiaries enrolling in Medicare Advantage has increased. The number of plans available to Medicare Advantage beneficiaries has also increased year after year, doubling in number over the last 7 years. As a result, Medicare Advantage beneficiaries have rarely had to contend with disruptions resulting from Medicare Advantage plans exiting the market (forced disenrollment), which may include adjustment to different provider networks, plan benefit packages, and supplementary benefits. However, recent reports suggest that many insurers will stop offering plans in 2026. This study characterized the scale and impact of Medicare Advantage plan exits for beneficiaries.
— JAMA, February 18, 2026
Meiselbach, Mark K., et al. “Forced Disenrollments Among Medicare Advantage Beneficiaries Following 2026 Plan Exits.” JAMA, 18 Feb. 2026. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2845237.
Virtually all (98.9%) Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan that terminated coverage at the end of 2025 (2.6 million beneficiaries) have at least one MA-PD plan available in 2026, with an average of 25 MA-PD options offered in their area in 2026. Most Medicare beneficiaries affected by a plan termination that had a zero-premium MA-PD option in 2025 also had a zero-premium MA-PD option in 2026.
— KFF, March 13, 2026
Nearly all Medicare Advantage beneficiaries with cut plans had 2nd option in 2026: KFF
More than two-thirds of these enrollees could access another MA plan from the same insurer, as well as additional choices from other carriers. Just under two-thirds had at least one choice from another insurer but not their current carrier.
Only 1.1% of those in terminated plans have no MA-PD alternative this year.
— Becker’s, March 16, 2026
Medicare Advantage’s ‘sunk-cost’ problem
This year, 1 in 10 Medicare Advantage enrollees — about 2.9 million people — will be forced to disenroll from their plan following a spike in plans exiting the market, according to a Feb. 18 study published in JAMA.
Behind many of those decisions lies what Scripps Health CFO Brett Tande describes as a classic “sunk-cost” dilemma: after years of building infrastructure, staffing and strategy around Medicare Advantage, can systems realistically walk away — even when contracts are losing money?
For a growing number of health systems, the answer is becoming clearer.
— Becker’s, February 20, 2026
10% of Medicare Advantage enrollees forced to switch plans for 2026: Study
The wave of forced disenrollments followed major disruption in the Medicare Advantage market during 2025, when insurers began scaling back their plan offerings amid rising utilization and federal reimbursement changes.
The study’s authors noted that the share of Medicare beneficiaries enrolling in MA has steadily increased over the last two decades, and the number of available plans has doubled over the last seven years, meaning beneficiaries had rarely faced this level of market disruption.
— Becker’s, February 19, 2026
One in 10 Medicare Advantage enrollees will be forced to disenroll in 2026, study finds
About 2.9 million people, or an estimated 1 in 10 Medicare Advantage (MA) enrollees, will be disenrolled from their plans in 2026, according to a February research letter published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Researchers used publicly available data from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services on enrollment and plan information from 2018 through 2026 to estimate the number of individuals forced to disenroll. This included 752,091 plan county observations representing 192,675,082 enrollee-years from 2017 to 2025. The sample included nonemployer health maintenance organization (HMO) and PPO plans across all 50 states and the District of Columbia.
Results showed that the mean forced disenrollment rate for MA beneficiaries jumped from 1% in 2018-2024 to 6.9% in 2025, and then to 10% in 2026. In the states of Idaho, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Hampshire and Maryland, at least 40% of beneficiaries will be forced to disenroll in 2026, while 92.2% of enrollees in Vermont will be subject to forced disenrollments.
— McKnight’s Long-Term Care News, February 19, 2026
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