Medicare Advantage · Tooele County, Utah

Medicare Advantage Plans in Tooele County, Utah for 2026

15 plans from 6 carriers, 10 of them at $0 — the Salt Lake shelf minus one name, with the same $3,500 floor. What the number means for a household that lives in Tooele and gets its care on both sides of the Oquirrhs.

Medicare On Main Data Desk

Published September 12, 2026 · 9 min read · Reviewed by Brian Penner, 22+ years in Medicare

Tooele County is the only large Utah market that lives in one county and gets most of its specialty care in another. Tooele City, Grantsville, Stansbury Park and Erda are a short drive from Salt Lake over I-80, and for many households the cardiologist, the cancer center and the surgeon are in Murray or Salt Lake City while the primary care doctor and the emergency room are on Main Street in Tooele. That geography is the whole story of Medicare Advantage here: the plan shelf is set by the county you live in, and the network has to reach the county you drive to. This article counts the shelf from the official CMS file and then walks the checks that actually narrow it.

Where the 15 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). Tooele County has 15 of them, from 6 organizations, 10 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 larger numbers for Tooele — 21 and 31 are both in circulation for 2026 — and they are not wrong so much as counting differently. Add in Medicare Advantage plans without drug coverage (mostly built for people with other drug coverage, such as VA or an employer plan), the Special Needs Plans limited to people with Medicaid or a qualifying condition, and sometimes the stand-alone Part D drug plans, and the total swells. If you have Medicare A and B, no other drug coverage and no Medicaid, the shelf you will actually choose from is closer to 15.

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

Tooele against its 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 Tooele against the nation; it is Tooele against the counties its residents drive to and the ones that look like it.

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

Two things stand out. First, Tooele is a metro shelf, not a rural one: 15 plans against Salt Lake's 24 is a real drop, but it is nearly double the 8 of the median Utah county, and it beats Moab's Grand County (8 plans, 2 carriers) by a wide margin. Every carrier on Tooele's list also sells in Salt Lake County, and the single difference between the two lists is Select Health, which appears in Salt Lake's file rows and not in Tooele's. Second, Tooele shares the metro's floor. Only 6 counties in the file have a plan with a $3,500 out-of-pocket maximum — Box Elder, Davis, Morgan, Salt Lake, Tooele, Weber — and they are all Wasatch Front counties or, in Tooele's case, the one just over the ridge. Juab to the south starts at $5,200; Grand starts at $4,900.

Which carriers sell here

The 6 organizations with MA-PD plans in Tooele County for 2026, straight from the file, in alphabetical order: Aetna Medicare, Devoted Health, HealthSpring, Humana, Regence BlueCross BlueShield of Utah, 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 doctor. Two of the six — the smaller organizations that concentrate on the Salt Lake metro — are the ones a rural county like Grand or Juab does not get, which is the practical meaning of "Tooele is a metro shelf."

If you see a carrier advertised in Tooele 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.

The hospital question, on both sides of the ridge

CMS's Hospital General Information file lists exactly one hospital in Tooele County: Mountain West Medical Center, 2055 North Main Street, Tooele — an acute care hospital with emergency services, ownership recorded as "Proprietary," and a CMS overall hospital rating of 4 stars as of the July 22, 2026 file. (That is a hospital quality rating; it has nothing to do with a plan's star rating.) There is no second option in the county for an inpatient stay, which makes two questions unavoidable for every one of the 15 plans:

1. Is Mountain West Medical Center 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 Main Street, it matters entirely.
2. Are the Salt Lake providers you are referred to in the same network? A plan can be approved for Tooele County and contract with one Salt Lake system and not another. Your cardiologist in Murray, your surgeon in Salt Lake City, the cancer center — by name, in the plan's own directory, not from a carrier's general statement.

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. For a household that lives in Grantsville and treats a chronic condition in Salt Lake, that distinction is worth more than the premium. And run the same check on your pharmacy: a plan's "preferred" pharmacy list decides what a Tier 3 drug costs at the counter, and the preferred chain in Tooele is not always the one you use.

$0 premium is not $0 cost

10 of Tooele's 15 plans 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 the 15 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 Tooele County that limit runs from $3,500 to $9,250 — a $5,750 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 that manages a heart condition or diabetes — Moab's Grand County, where our Utah office sits, runs 5.4% coronary heart disease and 11.2% diabetes among adults per CDC PLACES (2023), and the Tooele Valley's picture is worth pulling from the same source — the ceiling is the number to read first and the premium last.

Narrowing 15 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 Tooele 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 15 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 Tooele County ZIP, or bring it to us.

One last note for the west end of the county. Wendover and Dugway are as much Tooele County as Stansbury Park, so the shelf is the same 15 plans — but the nearest network hospital may be two hours away in either direction, which makes the HMO-versus-PPO question, and the emergency-care exception, the first thing to settle rather than the last.

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 7th-of-28 rank, the 8-plan median and the 6-county $3,500-floor list are computed from the same file rather than asserted. Hospital facts are from the CMS Hospital General Information dataset (modified July 22, 2026). 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.