Anthem & Aetna's Nov 1 Commission Surprise 😯

While I expected this AEP to be Wild, I didn’t expect this.

Two Carriers stopped paying commissions on MA/MAPD plans today, November 1st, in the middle of AEP!

[Friday evening note: I’m now hearing Cigna and Humana may also be doing the same thing. I’ll send out another post next week if true!]

Aetna and Anthem both announced they would no longer be paying commissions on a portion of their MA/MAPD plans.

For both, this only applies to policies issued Nov. 1 and after (already issued plans will continue receiving comp.). It is obvious they are seeing more that expected/desired sales on these plans, and are concerned with the ability to take care of the consumers and concerned with the loss ratio/profitability impact of letting these plans run wild for the rest of AEP.

Stopping commission payments will essentially stop sales (for all intents and purposes). It must be the only lever they have a this point.

While this isn’t unprecedented, the scope of it certainly is unprecedented.

It requires many in the industry to pivot on the fly. It’s also diminishing trust between Medicare distributors and Carrier partners. What will the long term impacts be?

A few weeks months we developed a data set to identify Plan Terminations in the MA/MAPD market. We talked for months about how this AEP would have more disruptions than normal. Once we saw and quantified the impacts from the plan terminations, we thought that was the end of things.

But now this… wild AEP indeed!

The first thing I do to understand moves like this is compile and analyze data. Which is what I did today, and am sharing with you below.

[The raw excel data file is at the bottom of this post. Download and explore on your own]

We’ve summarized:

1. # of plans

2. Current enrollment

3. Distribution by State

4. Distribution by Plan Type

5. Distribution by Star Rating

6. Distribution by Premium Change Bucket

7. Distribution by Drug Deductible Change Bucket

8. Distribution by MOOP Change Bucket

Enjoy!

Elevance (Anthem)

The Elevance list includes 66 plans:

• 11 of the plans are NEW for 2025

• 55 of the plans are Renewed Plans

The current enrollment on the 55 renewed plans is:

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