Humana Affirms Outlook, Calls Star Ratings In-Line With View

(Bloomberg) -- Humana Inc. shares jumped after the company affirmed its earnings guidance for 2025, reassuring investors who have been blindsided by insurance companies’ outlook cuts this year.

The company said its preliminary view of Medicare quality ratings are in-line with its assumptions in a filing Thursday. Some of the ratings were inadvertently disclosed on a Medicare website, it said.

Humana shares rose as much as 8.2% on the news, the most since July.

The Louisville, Kentucky-based insurer is focused almost entirely on private Medicare Advantage health plans, and it’s trying to recover from a big drop in quality scores last year. Doing well on the metrics, called star ratings, brings in extra money from the government in the form of bonus payments that insurers use to sweeten benefits for members and drive profits.

Humana said its 2026 star ratings “are generally in line with the assumptions” in its planning. About 20% of its members are enrolled in plans that will get at least four stars next year, the company said, which is the threshold for earning bonus payments.

The star ratings are closely watched by investors, since changes can swing stock prices. Last year some of the ratings first surfaced on a Medicare website that the public uses to shop for plans, ahead of the enrollment period that opens Oct. 15. That appears to have happened again this year. Humana said ratings were “inadvertently accessible” on the Medicare plan finder website “for a period of time” Wednesday.

(Updates with additional information starting in paragraph 4)

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