Medicare Advantage · Box Elder County, Utah

Medicare Advantage Plans in Brigham City and Tremonton, Utah

Box Elder County has 12 Medicare Advantage drug plans from 5 carriers for 2026, 7 of them at $0 — a shelf in the upper third of Utah's counties. What sets it apart is the map: two hospitals in two different health systems, thirty miles apart, and specialists in another county. That is one network check done twice.

Medicare On Main Data Desk

Published September 16, 2026 · 9 min read · Reviewed by Brian Penner, 22+ years in Medicare

Box Elder County is where northern Utah stops being one market. From Willard to Brigham City the county reads like the north end of the Ogden metro — same interstate, same employers, same television ads — and from Tremonton north through the Bear River valley it reads like farm country with its own hospital. The Medicare Advantage shelf is one shelf for all of it, because plans are approved by county. But the care is not one system, and that is the piece the mailers leave out. This article counts the shelf from the official CMS file, shows where Box Elder sits against Weber, Cache and the rest of the Wasatch Front, names the one carrier Ogden has that Brigham City does not, and then walks the network checks in the order that matters when your hospital and your specialist answer to different people.

Where the 12 comes from

Every fall CMS publishes a landscape file that lists each Medicare Advantage and Part D plan by the counties it is approved to sell in. We filtered the CY2026 file to Utah and to the category most people mean when they say "Medicare Advantage" — plans that include prescription drug coverage (MA-PD). Box Elder County has 12 of them, from 5 organizations, 7 at a $0 plan premium. Across the state's 28 counties the same file has 280 plan-county offerings, 178 of them at $0.

Aggregator sites quote "18 plans in Brigham City" and "22 in Tremonton," and the difference between those two numbers tells you how they are counted, since both towns are in the same county and see the same plans. Add in Medicare Advantage plans without drug coverage (built for people who already have drug coverage through the VA, a union or a former employer — a real population in a county with Hill Air Force Base retirees, a Northrop Grumman plant at Promontory and a steel mill in Plymouth), and the Special Needs Plans limited to people with Medicaid or a qualifying condition, and the count grows, or shrinks, depending on the year the page was last updated. If you have Medicare A and B, no other drug coverage and no Medicaid, the shelf you will actually choose from is 12. If you do carry retiree or union drug coverage, the MA-only plans we excluded may be exactly the ones to look at — that is a conversation about how your existing coverage coordinates, not about the count. For military retirees the coordination question is TRICARE For Life, and our TRICARE For Life post covers why an Advantage plan is usually the wrong tool for that household.

Source: CMS CY2026 Medicare Advantage / Part D Landscape, MA-PD category, accessed July 2026.

Box Elder against the Wasatch Front

Medicare.gov's rule for joining any plan is that you "live in the service area of the plan you want to join," and the service area is a list of counties. So the useful comparison is not Brigham City against Salt Lake; it is Box Elder against the counties its residents drive to for care.

Source: CMS CY2026 Medicare Advantage / Part D Landscape. In-network out-of-pocket maximum, lowest to highest among the county's MA-PD plans.

Three things stand out. First, Box Elder is not a thin county by Utah standards. Its 12 plans put it in the upper third of the state — 10 counties have more, 16 have fewer, and only Washington ties — a long way from the two-carrier, four-plan shelves in Grand, San Juan and the southern counties where our Moab office does most of its work. Second, the floor is a Wasatch Front floor. The lowest in-network out-of-pocket maximum in Box Elder is $3,500, and only 6 counties in the file have a plan that low: Box Elder, Davis, Morgan, Salt Lake, Tooele, Weber. Cache, one canyon east, starts at $4,900. Third, the shelf is Weber's shelf with one name missing. Ogden has 6 carriers and Box Elder has 5; the one Weber has and Box Elder does not is Select Health, which sells in 13 of the 28 counties, including Weber and Cache on either side of Box Elder, but not here for 2026. Box Elder is one of just 3 counties with ten or more plans and no Select Health (Box Elder, Tooele, Wasatch). Against Cache the swap runs the other way: Box Elder has HealthSpring, which Cache lacks, and Cache has Select Health, which Box Elder lacks. Same five-carrier count, different fifth name.

Which carriers sell here

The organizations with MA-PD plans in Box Elder County for 2026, straight from the file: Aetna Medicare, HealthSpring, Humana, Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Utah and UnitedHealthcare. That is a statement of availability and nothing more. We do not rank, rate or endorse carriers; we do not offer every plan available in your area; and a carrier's presence on the list says nothing about whether its network includes your hospital or your specialist in Ogden. The practical meaning of the Select Health gap is narrower than it sounds: a Perry household whose doctors are all in Ogden and who wants that particular carrier's plan cannot buy it, because they do not live in Weber County — the service-area rule runs on your address, not your doctor's. And HealthSpring, which sells in Box Elder and 7 other counties, is not on the Cache County shelf, so a household that retires from Brigham City to Logan will be re-shopping.

If you see a carrier advertised in Brigham City that is not on this list, it may be selling a plan in one of the categories we excluded (a plan without drug coverage, or a Special Needs Plan), or it may be a 2027 entrant. The 2027 plan data becomes public October 1, and we will not describe next year's shelf before CMS publishes it.

Two hospitals, two systems

CMS's Hospital General Information file lists exactly two hospitals in Box Elder County. Brigham City Community Hospital, 950 South Medical Drive, Brigham City — an acute care hospital with emergency services, ownership recorded as "Proprietary"; the hospital's own site places it in HCA Healthcare's MountainStar network. And Bear River Valley Hospital, 905 North 1000 West, Tremonton — an acute care hospital with emergency services, ownership recorded as "Voluntary non-profit - Private"; its own page describes an Intermountain Health hospital with a Level IV trauma center. Neither carries a CMS overall star rating in the July 22, 2026 file ("Not Available"), which is common for smaller hospitals and says nothing about quality or about networks. What the two entries do say is that the south half of the county and the north half are served by different health systems — and health systems contract with Medicare Advantage carriers separately. That makes three questions unavoidable for every one of these 12 plans:

1. Is your own hospital in this plan's 2026 network? Brigham City Community Hospital if you are in Brigham City, Perry or Willard; Bear River Valley Hospital if you are in Tremonton, Garland, Corinne, Honeyville or Bear River City. For an emergency it does not matter — Medicare.gov's HMO page lists "Emergency care" as covered regardless of network. For a scheduled surgery, imaging or an outpatient procedure, it matters entirely.
2. Is the other one? A Tremonton household referred to Brigham City for a service Bear River Valley does not offer, or a Brigham City household whose surgeon operates in Tremonton, is crossing a system line inside one county. A "yes" for one hospital does not carry to the other.
3. Are the Ogden, Logan or Salt Lake providers you are referred to in the same network? The cardiologist at McKay-Dee, the oncologist in Logan, the surgeon in Salt Lake — by name, in the plan's own directory, not from a carrier's general statement. Our hospital-test post walks through how to read a directory, and the University of Utah Health post covers the one system where "is it in network" has several answers.

One more fact sits beside the Tremonton entry and deserves a plain reading. Bear River Valley Hospital is an Intermountain hospital, and Intermountain's own insurance arm, Select Health, is not among the carriers selling Medicare Advantage drug plans in Box Elder County for 2026. That does not mean the hospital is out of network on the plans that are sold here — hospitals contract with many carriers, and who owns a hospital and who it contracts with are two different facts. It means the assumption a lot of Bear River valley households make ("it's an Intermountain hospital, so the Intermountain plan covers it") is not available on this shelf, and the question has to be asked of each of the 5 carriers directly. The plan type decides how much a wrong answer costs. On an HMO, in-network is required "except: Emergency care, Out-of-area urgent care, Temporary out-of-area dialysis." On a PPO you can go out of network and pay a larger share. When the specialist hospital is in another county either way, that distinction is worth more than the premium.

$0 premium is not $0 cost

7 of Box Elder's 12 plans show a $0 monthly plan premium — about 58%, a little under the statewide 63.6%. That is a real feature, and it is also the least useful number on the page. Medicare.gov's plan-costs page says that if a plan charges a premium, "you pay this in addition to the Part B premium" — and when it charges nothing, the Part B premium is still there: $202.90 a month in 2026 at the standard rate, per CMS, and more for households above the income-related surcharge thresholds. Copays, the drug deductible, the tier your prescription lands on and the out-of-pocket maximum all live below the premium line. A $0 plan is not free, and we will not call it that.

The number that does separate these plans is the out-of-pocket maximum. Medicare.gov's comparison page describes it as "a yearly limit on what you pay for covered Medicare services," and adds that Original Medicare has "no yearly limit on what you pay out-of-pocket, unless you have supplemental coverage." In Box Elder County that limit runs from $3,500 to $8,900 — a $5,400 difference in what a bad year can cost between two plans that may both be $0 and both carry the same 4.5-star rating, which is the highest overall rating available in every Utah county in the file. For a household managing a heart condition or diabetes — Grand County, where our Utah office sits, runs 5.4% coronary heart disease and 11.2% diabetes among adults per CDC PLACES (2023), and Box Elder's picture is worth pulling from the same source — the ceiling is the number to read first and the premium last.

Narrowing the shelf to a decision

Then the calendar. The Open Enrollment Period runs October 15 to December 7 for a January 1 start, and it is the one window in which every Box Elder County resident can move between any of these plans, or between Medicare Advantage and Original Medicare, without a qualifying reason. The 2027 versions of these plans — and any new entrants, including whether the Select Health gap closes — become public on October 1; the Annual Notice of Change your current plan mails by September 30 tells you what your own plan is doing to its premium, network and drug list. Read the letter, then compare on Medicare Plan Compare with your ZIP code, or bring it to us. If you are weighing Medicare Advantage against Original Medicare plus a supplement, our two-plan comparison framework and the supplemental-insurance post are the next two reads.

Two notes for the edges of the county. Snowville, Park Valley and the Grouse Creek country are Box Elder County too, so they get these 12 plans — but the nearest hospital may be Tremonton, Burley or Twin Falls depending on the road, and an Idaho hospital is a network question no Utah mailer will answer for you; ask the plan by name. And if you carry a retiree health plan from Northrop Grumman, Nucor, the school district, the county or the federal government, read how it coordinates with Medicare Advantage before you enroll in anything — for public employees our PEHP post covers the comparison, and for a company plan the plan's own retiree office can tell you whether joining an Advantage plan would end it. That is a question to settle before October 15, not after.

How we know all this: the Medicare On Main Data Desk frames every article with public data. Plan counts, $0-premium counts, carrier lists, star ratings and out-of-pocket ranges for every county named on this page are computed from the official CMS CY2026 Medicare Advantage / Part D landscape file (MA-PD category only), and the more-than / fewer-than rankings, the 6-county $3,500-floor list, the 3-county no-Select-Health list and the per-carrier county counts are computed from the same file rather than asserted. Hospital facts for both Box Elder County hospitals are from the CMS Hospital General Information dataset (modified July 22, 2026); each hospital's health system is taken from its own website. The service-area rule, the HMO exceptions, the "in addition to the Part B premium" sentence and the out-of-pocket limit definitions are quoted from Medicare.gov; the $202.90 premium is from CMS's fact sheet of November 14, 2025; Grand County prevalence is CDC PLACES (2023). No 2027 plan detail appears here because CMS has not published it. 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. This is education, not advice; confirm your plan, costs and eligibility with a licensed agent or Medicare.gov. We take no payment from any carrier to feature a plan, and no carrier or hospital on this page is endorsed.