Medicare Advantage · Carbon and Emery County, Utah

Are There Medicare Advantage Plans in Price, Utah?

Yes — 6 in Carbon County and 4 in Emery for 2026, from two carriers each, most of them at $0. A shelf that size is ordinary for rural Utah. What is not ordinary is the map: one hospital between the two counties, a different second carrier on each side of the line, and specialists a mountain pass away.

Medicare On Main Data Desk

Published September 14, 2026 · 9 min read · Reviewed by Brian Penner, 22+ years in Medicare

Castle Country asks this question differently than the Wasatch Front does. In Provo the question is which of 21 plans to pick. In Price and Castle Dale, the first question people ask us is whether Medicare Advantage is even sold here — the TV ads are national, the mailers are addressed from Salt Lake, and the nearest agency for many Emery County households is our office in Moab, an hour down I-70 from Green River. The answer is yes, and the shelf is a perfectly normal rural-Utah shelf. This article counts it from the official CMS file, shows where Carbon and Emery sit against their neighbors, and then walks the checks that actually matter when one hospital serves two counties.

Where the 6 and the 4 come 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). Carbon County has 6 of them, from 2 organizations, 4 at a $0 plan premium. Emery County has 4, from 2 organizations, 2 at $0. Across the state's 28 counties the same file has 280 plan-county offerings, 178 of them at $0.

Aggregator sites quote "8 plans in Price," and they are not wrong so much as counting differently. 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 coal country), and the Special Needs Plans limited to people with Medicaid or a qualifying condition, and the total grows. If you have Medicare A and B, no other drug coverage and no Medicaid, the shelf you will actually choose from is 6 in Carbon and 4 in Emery. 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.

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

Carbon and Emery against their neighbors

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 Price against Salt Lake; it is Carbon and Emery against the counties around them and the one their residents drive to for specialty 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, Carbon is not a thin county by Utah standards. Its 6 plans match Sanpete and Sevier exactly, sit below Grand's 8 and Duchesne's 9, and above San Juan's 4 — and 14 of the state's 28 counties have six or fewer. The two-carrier pattern is the rural norm too: 12 of 28 counties have exactly two organizations selling MA-PD plans. Second, the county line between Price and Castle Dale changes the second name on the shelf. Both counties have UnitedHealthcare, which sells in 25 of the 28 counties; Carbon's other carrier is Aetna Medicare (15 counties statewide) and Emery's is Humana (23 counties). Emery's pairing is the same one Grand and San Juan have — the southeastern Utah shelf — while Carbon's looks north toward Utah County and the Uinta Basin. Third, Emery's ceiling is low. Its highest in-network out-of-pocket maximum is $6,750, tied for the second-lowest county ceiling in the file; only Wayne County's single plan sits lower. Carbon's runs to $8,900, the same as Grand's.

Which carriers sell here

The organizations with MA-PD plans for 2026, straight from the file: in Carbon County, Aetna Medicare and UnitedHealthcare; in Emery County, Humana 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 Castleview or your specialist in Provo. The practical meaning of the split is simple: a couple in Wellington and their daughter's family in Huntington cannot end up on the same plan unless it is one of the shared carrier's, and a household that moves from Price to Castle Dale in retirement will be re-shopping.

If you see a carrier advertised in Castle Country 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.

One hospital, two counties

CMS's Hospital General Information file lists exactly one hospital in Carbon County: Castleview Hospital, 300 North Hospital Drive, Price — an acute care hospital with emergency services, ownership recorded as "Proprietary," and a CMS overall hospital rating of 2 stars as of the July 22, 2026 file. That rating is a hospital quality measure published by CMS; it is not a plan rating, and it has nothing to do with whether a plan contracts with the hospital. The same file lists no hospital in Emery County — not in Castle Dale, Huntington or Green River. Castleview's own site says it operates Emery Medical Center in Castle Dale as a family-practice and urgent-care clinic, which is the layer of care Emery has locally; an inpatient stay means Price, or the Wasatch Front, or for Green River, sometimes Moab or Grand Junction. That geography makes two questions unavoidable for every one of these plans:

1. Is Castleview Hospital in this plan's 2026 network? For an emergency it does not matter — Medicare.gov's HMO page lists "Emergency care" as covered regardless of network. For a scheduled admission, imaging or a specialist visit on Hospital Drive, it matters entirely.
2. Are the Wasatch Front providers you are referred to in the same network? A plan can be approved for Carbon County and contract with one Utah Valley or Salt Lake system and not another. Your cardiologist in Provo, your oncologist in Murray, the surgeon in Salt Lake City — 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.

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 drive to the nearest in-network hospital may be US-6 over Soldier Summit in January, that distinction is worth more than the premium. And run the same check on your pharmacy: with one or two pharmacies in Price and one in Castle Dale, whether yours is on a plan's "preferred" list decides what a Tier 3 drug costs at the counter for the whole year.

$0 premium is not $0 cost

4 of Carbon's 6 plans and 2 of Emery's 4 show a $0 monthly plan premium. 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 Carbon County that limit runs from $4,900 to $8,900 — a $4,000 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. Emery's band is tighter, $5,200 to $6,750. 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 Castle Country'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 Carbon and Emery 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 — 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.

Two notes for the edges of the map. Green River is Emery County, so it gets Emery's 4 plans and Emery's carriers — the same pairing as Moab's Grand County, which is where many Green River households already go for care; check that the plan's network reaches Moab Regional Hospital, not just Price. And if you carry a retiree health plan from a mine, a power plant, a school district or the county, read how it coordinates with Medicare Advantage before you enroll in anything — for public employees our PEHP post covers the comparison, and for a union or 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 14-county six-or-fewer count, the 12-county two-carrier count and the per-carrier county counts are computed from the same file rather than asserted. Hospital facts, and the absence of a listed hospital in Emery County, are from the CMS Hospital General Information dataset (modified July 22, 2026); the Castle Dale clinic is described from Castleview Hospital's 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 on this page is endorsed.