The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) released the 2027 Medicare Advantage (MA) and Part D Star Ratings on October 8, 2026, offering health plans a fresh look at quality performance across the market.
At first glance, the headline appears relatively uneventful. The enrollment-weighted average rating for Medicare Advantage plans with prescription drug coverage declined only slightly, from 4.01 stars in 2026 to 3.99 stars in 2027.
Look beneath that average, however, and a more consequential story emerges.
Only about 37% of Medicare Advantage-Prescription Drug (MA-PD) contracts earned four stars or higher for 2027, compared with roughly 44% in 2026. Yet approximately 71% of MA-PD enrollees are currently in contracts that will have four or more stars in 2027.
The takeaway for health plans is important: Star Ratings are not simply about improving performance, but also critical markers for plan selection and purchasing. Plans must monitor changes to measures and weights coming down the pipeline in order to improve measures that matter most while keeping pace with benchmarks that are themselves changing.
Star Ratings influence how beneficiaries compare plans, but the financial implications make the four-star threshold particularly significant. Plans earning four or more stars can qualify for Quality Bonus Payments, so relatively small movements around that threshold can have substantial consequences.
The 2027 results provide striking examples. Humana saw a substantial increase in the share of members enrolled in plans rated four stars or higher, while Alignment Healthcare experienced significant movement in the opposite direction.
That contrast underscores a critical point: an overall Star Rating is the end result of many underlying measures, changing performance thresholds, and evolving CMS methodology. Understanding what is driving the score can be as important as the score itself.
The modest change in the industry average masks much greater movement at the contract and measure level. Several factors contribute to that dynamic.
The performance bar continues to move. CMS recalculates measure cut points each year based on performance during the measurement period. As a result, improving a quality metric does not necessarily ensure that a plan will maintain or improve its Star Rating.
The measures themselves continue to evolve. For 2027, CMS added two Part D measures and made substantive changes to several others. The weights for Improving or Maintaining Physical Health and Improving or Maintaining Mental Health also increased from one to three. The CMS 2027 Star Ratings fact sheet provides details on these methodological changes.
Performance does not move uniformly across measures. Improvement in one area may be offset by weaker performance elsewhere. Changing measures specifications, weights and cut points can have a different effect on overall ratings from one year to the next
For plans, the message is straightforward: managing Stars performance requires looking beyond the final rating to understand the measures, members, and changing benchmarks driving it.
How can organizations create a strong Star Ratings strategy? Moving from static reporting to continuous performance management requires a different approach to data.
By the time final Star Ratings are released, much of the performance reflected in them has already occurred. Organizations therefore need to move beyond asking “What was our Star Rating?” toward a more actionable question: “What will our Star Rating be in the future?”
Answering that requires more than just retrospective data; it requires ongoing monitoring and strategic interventions
A strong Stars strategy can help organizations:
Connect data across the organization. Integrating claims, clinical information, and other quality data provides a more holistic view of performance.
Identify opportunities earlier. Reducing data latency and allowing for more timely analytics can surface open care gaps and emerging issues while there is still an opportunity to intervene.
Prioritize interventions. Patient-level insights can help focus resources on members and measures where intervention may have the greatest impact.
Connect Stars to broader strategy. Quality, clinical outcomes, member experience, and financial performance are interconnected. Stars data can inform decisions across clinical, pharmacy, network, and member engagement functions.
More change is coming. The 2027 Star Ratings demonstrate why a relatively stable industry average does not necessarily mean a stable environment for individual plans. The difference between 3.5 and 4 stars, or 4 and 4.5, can reflect a complex interaction among clinical outcomes, member experience, medication management, changing benchmarks and performance across member populations. The 2027 results are part of the continued evolution of the Star Ratings program.
That evolution makes adaptability increasingly important. Organizations need analytics that can respond not only to today’s measures and benchmarks, but also to a measurement environment that continues to change.
The priority for health plans becomes turning underlying data into an ongoing system for improving performance. Plans must translate fragmented healthcare data into measurable improvements in quality, member experience, and outcomes.
Utilizing vendor partners like Truven allows organizations to connect their disparate data, identify emerging gaps earlier, and proactively direct resources toward the measures and populations where improvement will have the greatest impact.
To learn more about how Truven can help reduce data latency with analytics on demand and turn quality measures into more meaningful action, reach out today.