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Centene Leads Part D Growth in 2025
Top of the market in both enrollment and growth
Tracy Emrich & Jared Strock
January 22, 2026
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Here is what you’ll find in this week’s newsletter!
Important links 🔗 - the best articles we found this week about the Medicare Market along with links to Jared’s recent LinkedIn posts.
Deep Dive 📚 - Centene Leads Part D Growth in 2025
Sponsor Snapshot 🚀 - brought to you by Medicare Market Insights +
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Here are IMPORTANT LINKS 🔗 for the week:
An Uneven Playing Field: Why Smaller Plans Are Calling for Stronger Guardrails on Medicare Advantage Marketing - (link)
UnitedHealth to accelerate Medicare Advantage payments to some rural hospitals - (link)
Kaiser Permanente affiliates to pay $556 million to resolve US claims alleging Medicare fraud - (link)
Medicare-funded medical residencies falling short of goals: Report - (link)
JPM26: How Alignment Healthcare's focus on the senior is driving growth - (link)
Clover Health News Release - January 14, 2026 - (link)
Directing Medicare: Past, Present, and Future - (link)
Jared’s recent LinkedIn posts:
DEEP DIVE 📚
Centene Leads Part D Growth in 2025
Last week we spotlighted the fastest‑growing Medicare Advantage carrier in 2025. This week, we’re shifting gears to see who topped the charts in the Part D market.
Since CMS won’t release AEP enrollment data until mid‑February, now’s a great time to look back at what happened last year.
With around 8.1M enrollees, Centene Corporation (“Centene”) topped the Part D market in both enrollment and growth, increasing 17% (1,182,732 enrollees) in 2025 (Dec. ‘24 - Dec. ‘25).
Let’s break this down to determine why Centene saw the most growth and what contracts and states this growth occurred in.
Note: Our analysis utilizes data obtained from the MMI+ Medicare Advantage Insights web app.
Why Centene?
The graph below demonstrates that Centene’s growth has outpaced other carriers in the individual Part D market since its acquisition of WellCare in 2019.
The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act introduced several provisions impacting Part D plans (read more here) causing some insurers to scale back Part D plan offerings.
Going into 2025, we saw 204,713 individuals impacted by terminated Part D plans. This amount doubled going into 2026, with 478,491 individuals impacted by terminated Part D plans.
Notably, Centene did not terminate any Part D plans in 2025 and 2026. However, in an effort to save “hundreds of millions of dollars”, Centene did stop paying Part D commissions to brokers and agents starting with the 2025 plan year, and continued that into 2026.
Top Contracts
Wellcare Value Script contracts dominated the top 5 contracts with the most growth for Centene in 2025.
These 4 Wellcare Value Script contracts are enhanced drug benefit plans with $0 total premiums in the following markets:
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Wellcare Classic (S4802-094) is a basic drug benefit contract (actuarially equivalent standard) in California with a total premium of $16.80.
Top Growth States
Now, let’s dive deeper and see where the largest growth occurred.
Ten states accounted for half of Centene’s overall Part D growth in 2025. As you can see from the chart below, Centene’s growth in these states likely came from CVS, Group 1001 (Clear Spring Health), and UnitedHealth Group.
We’ll continue to track and report Part D enrollment growth trends for 2026!
MMI+ users can generate these visuals and data in the Medicare Enrollment Insights web app. → UPGRADE
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