Health Plan Weekly

Although UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty caused a brief health insurer stock selloff with his remarks about a Medicaid “disturbance,” both his company and other managed care powerhouses have since been busy trying to reassure jittery investors.  

The trouble started on May 29, when Witty was answering questions from analyst Lance Wilkes during the Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference. Witty pointed out that “there’s probably going to be some disturbance around” syncing Medicaid managed care payment rates with the heightened costs associated with covering Medicaid enrollees, now that millions of people have been dropped from the rolls during the “unwinding” process.  

Although overall customer satisfaction rankings improved year over year in the J.D. Power 2024 U.S. Commercial Member Health Plan Study, nearly all evaluated health plans struggled to provide a high-quality digital customer experience. Indeed, one perennially high-performing plan admits that it, too, has been striving to solve the digital-experience puzzle — but it hopes that a new affiliation agreement will help by adding much-needed scale and access to capital. 

This year’s J.D. Power survey measured satisfaction among 29,188 members of 147 group and individual health plans in 22 regions throughout the U.S. from January to April 2024. Plans are scored based on performance in eight core dimensions: “able to get health services how/when I want,” “digital channels,” “ease of doing business," “helps save time and money,” “people,” “product/coverage offerings,” “resolving problems or complaints” and “trust.” 

UnitedHealth Group’s Surest brand has become a hot product in recent months, with sales of the alternative benefit design accounting for one third of the health care giant’s new commercial business, according to some accounts. UnitedHealthcare, the firm’s managed care arm, pitches commercial clients on Surest by promising lower costs and higher quality — without sacrificing a broad network.  

Alternatives to conventional PPO plans are more appealing than ever for commercial insurance plan sponsors, who have struggled with sharp medical cost and premium increases in recent years. But restrictive narrow network plans are often unpopular with plan members, and payer stakeholders have begun to shy away from models that shift costs to members. 

Insurers that participate in the individual, small-group and large-group markets are estimated to pay a total of $1.1 billion in medical loss ratio (MLR) rebates to their customers in 2024 — falling short of record-high $2.5 billion in rebates in 2020 but staying similar to rebates levels in 2022 and 2023, according to a KFF analysis on preliminary data filed by insurers.

Under the Affordable Care Act, insurers that spend less than a certain percentage of their premium income on health care claims and quality improvement must rebate customers. Individual/small group plans must issue rebates if their MLRs fall below 80%, while the cutoff is 85% for large group plans. About half of the total rebate amount will go to individual market enrollees this year. Nearly $12 billion in rebates in total have been issued since the ACA required insurers to pay back excess profits to customers starting in 2012.