Health system-owned Medicare Advantage enrollment continues to grow overall, but providers' share of the national MA market currently sits at 13%, compared to 17% in 2019.
Becker's sat down with Geisinger Health Plan's Chief Medical Officer, John Bulger, DO, to talk about how the organization employs a "care and coverage" strategy to continue to grow its Medicare Advantage membership.
Listen to the full podcast with Dr. Bulger here.
Question: What does Geisinger Health Plan's Medicare Advantage strategy entail in 2024?
Dr. John Bulger: There's been a large increase in competition nationally and certainly within Pennsylvania over the last five to seven years in the Medicare Advantage space. Large national payers are very active now in Pennsylvania.
Strategically, we are growing and we'd like to continue to grow. Our goal is to grow at least at the same speed the market does. We're partnering with our own clinical enterprise and other partners to try and find ways we can continue to grow in this space.
Where you have care and coverage, either through us or other provider partners in the community that we work closely with, those are the places that we've been focused on from a Medicare Advantage standpoint, as opposed to selling an MA plan without close clinical partners. A care and coverage relationship is really what we're focused on.
You can't focus enough on being adaptable to change, and we've tried to focus on how to increase value to the members and to our patients. If you focus on that, it becomes easier to come up with strategies and how you're going to do it. Even with a pandemic and economic downturns, Geisinger continues to be successful because that's what we focus on.