Top 5 States for Medicare Drug Plan Agent-Broker Comp Increases

How hard do insurers want to compete for your older clients' Medicare prescription drug plan business for the 2024 annual enrollment period? A review of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services agent-broker compensation data for the Medicare drug plan market suggests: Hard. In the typical state, a producer compensation index we created increased 16.4% between last year and this year, to 33.30. The annual enrollment period for 2024 drug plan coverage starts Oct. 15 and runs through Dec. 7. For a look at the states with the five biggest compensation index increases between the annual enrollment periods for 2023 and 2024, see the gallery above. The gallery shows just five states because the next 15 states are tied, with increases of about 18%. For information about the index figures and index changes for all 50 states and the District of Columbia, see the table below. What it means: Every year, questions arise about whether CMS subsidy changes and marketing rule changes, or general economic conditions, will break the private Medicare plan markets. For now, at least, the producer compensation data suggest that insurers still want to cover your clients' insulin and cholesterol pills. The program: Medicare provided no coverage for prescriptions filled at retail pharmacies until 2006. Today, Medicare Advantage plans provide drug coverage for 29 million of the 66 million Medicare enrollees, and the stand-alone drug plans included in the compensation index cover drugs for 22 million people. The Google Trends tool, which provides a peek at the company's search activity, suggests that Medicare drug plan marketing activity has been very effective this year: Search activity for the term "medicare drug plan" is at its highest level since 2009, when consumers were still learning to use the program. The index: CMS does not provide total amounts of agent-producer compensation paid per plan or average compensation paid per producer in the compensation data. To create the compensation index, we averaged the figures for six types of compensation shown in the compensation spreadsheets: the high and low referral fees, initial commissions and renewal commissions. The resulting index shows an average of the amounts paid, but it might not be close to the actual average or median amounts paid, because of the lack of information about how many producers get the high amounts, how many get the low amounts and how many get amounts somewhere in between.