Utah · 2027 Star Ratings, published yesterday

Is There a 5-Star Medicare Advantage Plan in Utah for 2027?

CMS released the 2027 Star Ratings on October 8, 2026, and the short answer for Utah is yes, one, with a catch that matters: the only 5-star contract on the state's shelf sells a single nursing-home Special Needs Plan, open to people living in a facility. For everyone else the ceiling is 4.5 stars. Here is the 5-star plan and who can actually join it, every Salt Lake County plan with its new rating beside last year's, how many of your neighbors are in each, which contracts moved, the ratings behind the five plans that mailed non-renewal letters, and what the stars look like in nine other Utah counties.

Medicare On Main Data Desk

Published October 9, 2026 · 10 min read · Reviewed by Brian Penner, 22+ years in Medicare

How we built this. The CMS fact sheet says the 2027 ratings were "published on the Medicare Plan Finder on Oct. 8, 2026" and "will impact 2028 MA quality bonus payments." We downloaded the 2027 Star Ratings data tables and matched the Summary Ratings file, contract by contract, to every Utah row in the CY2027 landscape file. The 2026 column is the Overall Star Rating field in the CY2026 file; the members column is the September 2026 CMS county enrollment file. Salt Lake County had 166,854 people on Medicare in June and 96,718 of them in Medicare Advantage, per the CMS monthly enrollment file; Utah as a whole has 490,235. Medicare On Main does not offer every plan available in your area, and a table of federal ratings is not a ranking by us.

The one 5-star plan, and who can join it

The fact sheet counts 15 MA-PD contracts nationally with the high-performing icon for 2027, 6 of them repeat winners from 2026. We checked all fifteen against the Utah rows in the landscape file. One matches: H0710, a UnitedHealthcare contract held by Care Improvement Plus South Central Insurance Co., rated 5 overall, 4.5 on Part C and 5 on Part D, up from 4.5 last year. Its single Utah plan is UHC Nursing Home Plan UT-F001 (PPO I-SNP), plan 051, listed for Box Elder, Davis, Salt Lake, Utah and Weber counties at a $14.00 premium and a $9,850 in-network cap for 2027 (it was $37.60 and $9,250 in 2026). In September it had 83 members in Salt Lake County, 24 in Davis and 15 in Box Elder; Utah and Weber counties had fewer than eleven each, which CMS suppresses.

The letters after the name are the catch. An I-SNP is an Institutional Special Needs Plan, and 42 CFR § 422.2 defines the people it serves: "an MA eligible individual who continuously resides or is expected to continuously reside for 90 days or longer in" a skilled nursing facility, a nursing facility, an intermediate care facility, a psychiatric or rehabilitation hospital or unit, or a long-term care hospital. Medicare.gov adds that "you can only stay enrolled in an SNP if you continue to meet the special conditions of the plan," and that "if you're interested in an I-SNP, and live in a facility, check that the plan has providers that serve people where you live." So the honest answer to the question in the title is: yes, a 5-star Medicare Advantage plan is sold in five Wasatch Front counties, it is built for nursing-home residents, and if you are reading this at your own kitchen table it is not a plan you can join. That is not a criticism of the plan or the company; the plan does a specific job, and CMS says it does it well. It just is not the plan most people searching this question are looking for.

Nothing else in Utah is 5 stars. We went county by county through all 29 and found no other 5-star row, not in St. George, not in Logan, not in Moab. The low-performing contracts table (four contracts nationally) has no Utah contract either.

Every Salt Lake County general plan with drug coverage, rated

The rating belongs to the contract, the "H" number before the dash, so plans sharing a contract share a rating. Premium and cap are the 2027 figures from the landscape file; "Part C / Part D" are the health and drug summaries; "Members" is Salt Lake County enrollment in September 2026 (a dash means no September row for the county). The same 22 plans with their drug deductibles and the 2026 figures are in the 2027 Salt Lake City plan list.

Sources: CMS 2027 Star Ratings Data Tables, Summary Ratings (2027 columns); CMS CY2026 landscape file (2026 column); CY2027 landscape file (premium, cap); CMS CPSC enrollment, September 2026. Devoted Health's contract H4473 shows "Plan too new to be measured," which 42 CFR § 422.166 assigns to contracts less than a year old; it is not a low score. Humana Value Choice H5216-471 is the 2027 successor to the discontinued H5216-456; whether you were crosswalked into it is in your letter, as explained in is Humana Value Choice PPO ending in Utah?

Add it up and the county's shelf sits a little above the country. Seven of 22 plans are 4.5, which is the highest a plan you can simply join reaches anywhere in Utah, and 18 of 22 are 4 or better. By membership it is more lopsided: about 13,867 Salt Lake members are in the 4.5-star general plans, dominated by Humana Value Choice 032 with 7,488, while about 45,863 are in 4-star plans, led by Select Health Medicare Essential (11,276), the AARP Essentials HMO-POS (11,057) and the AARP UT-0003 HMO-POS (9,315). The one 3.5-star plan, Aetna Medicare Signature HMO, has 244.

Which contracts moved, and why

Regence is the story of the year in Utah. Its contract H4605 went from 3.5 to 4.5, carried by a 4.5 on the drug side, and both of its Salt Lake PPOs (Classic at $87, Enhanced at $158) now carry the highest rating available to the general public. Humana's two Utah contracts rose from 3.5 to 4. Aetna's H5521 and Select Health's H1994 each slipped from 4.5 to 4, and the split tells you why: Aetna is 4.5 on Part C and 3 on Part D; Select Health is the reverse, 4 and 4.5. The fact sheet is direct about movement: "Changes in Star Ratings year-over-year are normal and expected and vary by measure," and "the cut points are recalculated each year based on performance during the measurement period." Two measures were added for 2027, two retired, and the two "improving or maintaining" health measures tripled in weight. A contract can perform the same and move half a star when the yardstick moves.

The five Salt Lake plans that are leaving, and their ratings

If you received a non-renewal letter dated October 2, you may wonder whether your plan was discontinued because it was rated poorly. The ratings mostly say no:

Members from the September 2026 CPSC file via the county dataset behind our plan-exit pages. The HealthSpring contracts have no Utah Medicare Advantage plan for 2027, which is covered in Cigna Medicare Advantage is leaving Utah; the Select Health plan in is Select Health Medicare + Kroger ending?

Humana Value Choice 456 and Select Health Medicare + Kroger, the two big ones with 15,410 Salt Lake members between them, sit under contracts rated 4 for 2027, and Regence Valiance's contract is now 4.5. The two HealthSpring plans' contracts are 3, and HealthSpring is not selling Medicare Advantage in Utah at all next year. A plan leaving is a business decision about that plan's design and economics, which the rating does not measure. Nothing in this table is a judgment about any company, and neither is anything we write.

The 5-star Special Enrollment Period, and who actually has it

You may have read that a 5-star plan can be joined almost any time of year. 42 CFR § 422.62(b)(15) is the rule: an individual "requesting enrollment in an MA plan offered by an MA organization with a Star Rating of 5 Stars" may do so "only once for the contract year ... beginning the December 8th before that contract year through November 30th of that contract year." Two conditions sit inside that sentence. The plan has to be sold where you live, and you have to be eligible for it. On the Wasatch Front the first condition is met for 2027 and the second is met only by people who live in, or are headed into, a nursing facility for 90 days or more. If that describes a parent or a spouse, the window is real: a move into a Salt Lake, Davis, Weber, Utah or Box Elder county facility opens the chance to join the 5-star I-SNP any time through November 30, 2027, and the facility's business office will know whether the plan's providers serve its residents. For everyone else the calendar is the ordinary one: October 15 to December 7 for a January 1 start; January 1 to March 31 for one change if you are in an Advantage plan on January 1; and, if your plan was discontinued, the December 8 to February 28 window with the dates in how long do I have if my plan ends?

The stars in nine other Utah counties

General Medicare Advantage plans with drug coverage for 2027, by the overall rating of their contract. The 5-star column is the nursing-home I-SNP, where it is sold.

Source: CY2027 landscape file joined to the 2027 Summary Ratings by contract. The three 4.5-star contracts (Regence, UHC H2001, Humana H7617) reach every county on this list; the county-by-county plan lists are in Davis and Weber, Utah County, Tooele, Box Elder and Morgan and St. George.

How the national picture moved

Table 1 of the fact sheet counts rated MA-PD contracts by overall rating: 5-star contracts fell from 22 to 15, 4.5-star from 89 to 65, 4-star from 118 to 108, while 3-star rose from 98 to 124; rated contracts went from 516 to 508 and the enrollment-weighted average from 4.01 to 3.99. "Approximately 37% of MA-PDs (188 contracts) that will be offered in 2027 earned four stars or higher," and "weighted by enrollment, approximately 71% of MA-PD enrollees are currently in contracts that will have four or more stars." Salt Lake County's 18 of 22 at 4 or better is well above that 37%; its lack of a general 5-star plan is shared by most of the country, since fifteen contracts cannot cover many counties. We did the same exercise for Mesa County the day the ratings came out, in Medicare Advantage Star Ratings 2027: Grand Junction plans, where nothing reaches 4.5.

How I would use the rating this fall

1. Stop looking for the 5. In Utah it is a nursing-home plan. The useful ceiling for a plan you can join is 4.5, and seven Salt Lake plans are there; eleven more are at 4.
2. Read the Part C and Part D split. Aetna's H5521 is 4.5 on the health side and 3 on the drug side; Select Health's H1994 is 4 and 4.5. If you take several brand-name drugs, the Part D column describes your experience better than the overall.
3. Do the network and drug checks first, then look at the stars. The network question for Intermountain and University of Utah Health is in which Utah hospitals are in which networks; the cap comparison is in the lowest-cap plans in Salt Lake County.
4. Do not switch for a half-star. Four of the six contracts that moved this year moved on recalculated cut points and reweighted measures. Your Annual Notice of Change is what changed your plan.
5. If your plan was discontinued, the old contract's rating is irrelevant now. Compare the 2027 shelf on its own terms, and remember the Medigap door with no health questions is open through March 4, 2027, as laid out in what to do when your Utah plan is discontinued.
6. Look the rating up yourself on Medicare Plan Finder from October 15, and ignore any "2027" rating you saw before October 8; it was last year's.

How we know all this: the Medicare On Main Data Desk frames every article with public data — here, the CMS "2027 Medicare Advantage and Part D Star Ratings" fact sheet and the 2027 Star Ratings Data Tables (Summary Ratings, High Performing Contracts and Low Performing Contracts files), published October 8, 2026; the CMS CY2027 and CY2026 Medicare Advantage and Part D landscape files, filtered to Utah by Contract ID and Plan ID, for the plan lists and the 2026 ratings; the CMS CPSC enrollment file for September 2026 for county enrollment by plan; 42 CFR §§ 422.2, 422.62 and 422.166 as published on Cornell LII; Medicare.gov's Special Needs Plans page; and the CMS Medicare Monthly Enrollment file for Salt Lake County. Ratings are reproduced at the contract level exactly as CMS publishes them; where CMS reports "Plan too new to be measured" we say so rather than infer. Medicare On Main is a licensed independent insurance agency. We do not offer every plan available in your area. Any information we provide is limited to the plans we do offer in your area. Please contact Medicare.gov or 1-800-MEDICARE to get information on all of your options. Not connected with or endorsed by the U.S. government or the federal Medicare program. Plan and company names appear as factual reporting of a federal dataset; nothing here is a recommendation of, or a judgment about, any company or plan, and a $0 premium is not "free" — the Part B premium still applies. This is education, not advice.