If you’re on a Medicare Advantage plan in Florida, keep an eye on your mailbox this month. Insurers are required to send out Annual Notice of Change (ANOC) letters by September 30, and this year, for a meaningful number of Florida seniors, that letter won’t just list a new copay — it’ll say the plan isn’t being offered at all in 2027.
What’s Actually Changing
Humana is scaling back its Medicare Advantage business nationally, discontinuing plans that together cover an estimated 500,000 to 600,000 members for 2027, according to Becker’s Payer Issues. Humana expects to shift roughly 40% of those members into a different Humana plan automatically, but that still leaves somewhere around a quarter-million people nationwide who will need to actively choose new coverage on their own. The plans being cut tend to be the lower-performing ones — generally those rated 3.5 stars or below for the 2027 bonus year — which you can actually check for yourself right now at medicare.gov/plan-compare before your letter even arrives.
Florida carries an outsized share of this. More than 60% of Florida’s Medicare-eligible population is enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan — the highest rate of any state in the country — and Humana is one of the two largest MA carriers in Florida. When a carrier that size trims its footprint, Florida feels it more than almost anywhere else.
UnitedHealthcare is also shrinking its Florida presence, and the impact isn’t limited to which plans exist — it’s also about which doctors and hospitals stay in-network. In Southwest Florida, Lee Health (the region’s largest hospital and physician network) is ending its contracts with UnitedHealthcare at the end of this year, meaning UHC Medicare Advantage members in the Fort Myers, Cape Coral, and Bonita Springs area will find Lee Health facilities out-of-network starting January 1, 2027 — even if their plan technically still exists.
Why This Is Happening
Medicare Advantage has gotten less profitable for insurers over the past couple of years, largely due to changes in how CMS calculates star-rating bonuses and reimbursement. Rather than raise premiums across the board, carriers are increasingly choosing to exit their weakest-performing counties and plans outright — which is why this year’s changes are showing up as outright plan discontinuations and network exits, not just cost adjustments.
Why This Matters for You
Here’s the part that catches people off guard: in Florida, auto-enrollment into a replacement plan is not guaranteed in every county. If your specific plan is discontinued and you don’t actively pick something new during AEP, you can default back to Original Medicare — which, on its own, doesn’t include prescription drug coverage. For anyone taking regular medications, that’s not a small gap.
There is one genuinely useful protection buried in this, though: if your Medicare Advantage plan is leaving Medicare altogether or no longer serving your area, and you return to Original Medicare, you may have guaranteed-issue rights to certain Medicare Supplement plans — meaning the insurer generally can’t deny you or charge more based on your health. That window can start up to 60 days before your MA coverage ends and generally continues for up to 63 days afterward, something that’s usually not available once you’re past your initial Medicare enrollment period. (State law can sometimes provide additional protections, so it’s worth confirming your specific situation.) If you’ve ever been curious about Medicare Supplement but assumed you’d missed your shot, a forced plan exit for this reason is one of the few times that door reopens.
What You Can Do
Watch your mail (and your carrier’s online member portal) for your ANOC letter before September 30 — don’t assume “no news is good news” if it hasn’t shown up yet. Once AEP opens on October 15, you’ll have until December 7 to make any changes, effective January 1, 2027. Before then, it’s worth checking your current plan’s star rating at medicare.gov/plan-compare so you’re not caught off guard. And if your plan is one of the ones being discontinued, remember that guaranteed-issue right on a Medicare Supplement plan — it’s worth exploring even if you’ve never seriously considered one before.
We do not offer every plan available in your area. Any information we provide is limited to those plans we do offer in your area. Please contact Medicare.gov or 1-800-MEDICARE to get information on all of your options.
