Every Fall, Medicare providers gear up for Annual Enrollment, when everyone gets a fresh look at their coverage and carriers release updated plan details, what's covered, what's changed, and what's different from the year before. Most of this arrives as your Annual Notice of Change, or ANOC, the letter or email every plan sends its members each year explaining what's shifting for the next plan year. Here are three trends worth watching for 2027, some you'll see reflected directly in your own ANOC this fall.
First, PPO plans are fading. This has been building for a couple of years and it's accelerating: PPOs cost carriers more to run because of their wider, less controlled networks, and more carriers are trimming or discontinuing them each year. You may also notice more specialists requiring referrals even on plans that traditionally didn't, since that helps carriers manage who's actually seeing specialty care versus what a primary care visit could have handled first.
Second, prescription drug costs, especially for higher-tier specialty medications, remain under real pressure, and rising Part D premiums are part of this year's story too. Discount resources like GoodRx and Cost Plus Drugs have become genuinely useful tools for finding lower prices on higher-tier medications, and asking your physician whether a generic alternative exists is always worth doing, even if it won't fully offset specialty drug pricing.
Third, watch how benefits are shifting between plan tiers, not just whether your premium moves. Two things are happening at once: $0 premium plans are seeing supplemental extras, dental, groceries, fitness, and OTC allowances, quietly trimmed even while the advertised price stays flat, while plans asking for a modest premium are increasingly offering proportionally richer benefits in return. Part of what's driving this is CMS itself, which has been tightening the rules around what counts as an allowable supplemental benefit and cracking down on benefits that look more like a perk than genuine health value, pushing carriers to rethink how they spread benefits across their plan lineup. Zero-premium plans aren't going away, but the value gap between them and paid tiers appears to be widening, so this is a year to compare, not assume.
All of this points to the same conclusion: this isn't a year to assume your plan renewed itself the way it always has. We're here to help you work through what's actually changed and how it applies to you, so give us a shot if you'd like a second set of eyes.
