Fast-Growing MA Supplemental Benefits Support Aging in Place

Insurers are more carefully tailoring their preventive supplemental benefit offerings to support Medicare Advantage enrollees aging in place, with benefits such as home and bathroom safety modifications more than doubling between 2023 and 2024, according to a new Faegre Drinker analysis of Plan Benefit Package (PBP) data. But as CMS takes steps to gather more data on supplemental benefits, less impactful benefits could be thinned from the pack while those with greater potential to improve health outcomes are embraced by insurers.

Faegre Drinker has been tracking the growth of supplemental benefits since 2021, when MA insurers were in the early days of experimenting with new offerings under CMS’s reinterpretation of “primarily health related” supplemental benefits. The latest analysis, published on Dec. 5 and shared in advance with AIS Health, focuses on the preventive supplemental benefit market due to the large variance in uptake, with some benefits offered by fewer than 100 plans and others featured in more than 5,000 PBPs. This year, Faegre Drinker split the categories into two types: popular (i.e., offered by more than 1,000 plans) and less popular (i.e., those offered by fewer than 1,000 plans).