UnitedHealthcare's June Plan F Reprice Lands Alongside 35%-Plus Closed-Block Filings

UnitedHealthcare's AARP Plan F block absorbed a June 1, 2026 rate increase running $10.64 to $47.02 a month (CTPF, June 2026), while Humana filed as high as 35.0% in Nebraska and LifeShield National cleared 39.2% in Virginia. Plan F closed to new Medicare entrants in January 2020, so each increase pushes the healthiest remaining lives into Plan G, leaving a smaller, sicker pool to fund the next filing.

The June Reprice and the Filings Around It

The UnitedHealthcare notice, sent to plan sponsors including the Chicago Teachers' Pension Fund, broke the increase down by age band: 70-71 year-olds moved from $194.19 to $211.78 a month, 72-74 year-olds from $211.97 to $227.59, and beneficiaries 75 and older from $228.65 to $249.97 (CTPF, June 2026), increases of roughly 7% to 9% before accounting for each member's state, sex, and any household discount. That range sits inside a wider 2026 pattern for closed and Plan F-specific business. Humana's spring filings cleared 34.1% in Michigan and 35.0% in Nebraska, LifeShield National posted a peak of 39.2% in Virginia, and Insurance Company of North America filed 17% to 22% across Midwest and East Coast states, all landing in the 15% to 35%-plus band that current market tracking assigns specifically to Plan F's closed risk pool (Medicare Planning, 2026 market analysis).

Carrier	Geography	Block	2026 filed increase
UnitedHealthcare (AARP)	National, age-banded	Plan F	$10.64-$47.02/month
Humana	Michigan	Plan F, closed	34.1%
Humana	Nebraska	Plan F, closed	35.0%
LifeShield National	Virginia	Plan F, closed	39.2%
Insurance Company of North America	Midwest / East Coast	Plan F, closed	17%-22%
Six largest carriers	Multi-state	Plan G, open	12%-26%

A Pool Closed Since 2020, Still Setting the Marginal Price

MACRA barred insurers from selling or issuing Plan F, along with Plan C, to anyone who became newly eligible for Medicare on or after January 1, 2020; beneficiaries who already held the plan, or who were Medicare-eligible before that date, could keep it or still buy it (Medicare Rights Center, on MACRA's Plan F/C closure). Six years on, that closure is doing exactly what a closed risk pool does: the block can only age, and nothing offsets it from the entry side. First-dollar design compounds the exposure. Plan F pays the Part B deductible, $283 in 2026, and the Part A inpatient deductible, $1,736, in full, so a member's utilization and any facility-side cost inflation flow straight into claims with no cost-sharing to slow it down (CMS, 2026 Medicare Parts A & B Premiums and Deductibles). More than 12 million people, 43% of everyone in traditional Medicare, buy some form of Medigap coverage (KFF Health News, April 2026), and Plan F's first-dollar design was for decades the most popular plan in that market precisely because it carried no deductible or coinsurance exposure at all. That popularity is now the liability: a closed block with a large starting population and no cost-sharing brake produces steeper morbidity drift as it ages than any Medigap plan design still open to new, healthier entrants.

Where Static Lapse Assumptions Break

A block-level lapse assumption calibrated to historical Medigap experience understates what happens on a closed Plan F book precisely because the increase itself is the shock. A healthy 74-year-old who can still pass medical underwriting has every reason to shop a same-insurer or competitor Plan G or Plan N policy the moment the renewal notice arrives, since Plan G covers everything Plan F does except the Part B deductible at a materially lower premium once the closed-block loading is stripped out. The member who cannot pass underwriting, because of a recent claim, a new diagnosis, or ordinary age-related decline, has no exit and stays. That selection is not proportional to the size of the increase in any simple sense; it is closer to a step function tied to underwriting eligibility, which is why a shock-lapse assumption indexed to the current filing's own magnitude, rather than a flat annual rate trended from prior experience, is the input that keeps a Plan F indication honest. A pricing team that rolls last year's lapse experience forward without re-underwriting for what the current filing itself will trigger is pricing the pool that existed before the increase, not the one that remains after it.

The Open-Block Comparison Quantifies the Gap

The clearest evidence that Plan F's premium is not simply tracking medical trend is the size of the gap against open-block plans priced off the same cost environment. Telos Actuarial's tracking of the six largest Medigap carriers found Plan G increases running 12% to 26% in the first quarter of 2026 alone (Telos Actuarial, Q1 2026 update), with Cigna, Humana, and UnitedHealthcare each posting roughly a 6% to 8% jump from 2025 to 2026 by the second quarter (Telos Actuarial, Q2 2026 update). Plan N, which layers modest per-visit copays on top of Plan G's design, filed in the 5% to 18% range over the same period (Medicare Planning, 2026 market analysis). Both plans are open to new business and draw a continuous stream of newly eligible 65-year-olds, so their increases track medical cost trend on a book that is not structurally aging in one direction. Plan F's 34% to 39% closed-block filings, running roughly one and a half to three times that open-block range, are the anti-selection premium, not a trend differential. "Carriers are looking to correct their premium rates in light of upward pressure on their claims experience," Telos Actuarial's Brett Mushett told KFF Health News in April 2026, a description that applies across the market but understates how much of the pressure on Plan F specifically is self-inflicted by the block's own closure. Chalen Jackson of the distributor Integrity put the shift in blunter terms: "Five years ago, it was exceedingly uncommon to have a carrier with a rate increase of more than 10%. Now it's very common to see it over 20%" (Chalen Jackson, KFF Health News, April 2026).

The Run-Off Question Behind the Trough

Every closed Plan F block eventually reaches a point where the actuarially indicated increase is larger than a state regulator will approve in a single filing, or larger than the remaining policyholders can absorb without triggering the exact lapse the pricing is trying to avoid. NAIC's multistate rate review framework, built for long-term care but increasingly a reference point for Medigap regulators facing the same aging-block dynamic, gives states a coordinated venue to phase large increases over several years rather than approve the full indicated amount at once, itself an implicit acknowledgment that the mathematically indicated rate and the politically approvable rate have diverged. When that gap opens, a block's economics shift from an ongoing pricing exercise to a run-off exercise: durational morbidity assumptions need to reflect a shrinking, aging, adversely selected population rather than a stable one, and reserves need to be tested against a lapse curve that keeps compressing toward zero as underwriting-eligible members exit and only the uninsurable remain. A valuation actuary certifying reserves on a Plan F block this cycle is not only checking whether the current increase clears; the more consequential question is whether the block's terminal morbidity and lapse assumptions still hold once two or three more rounds of 30%-plus increases have run their course, each one further concentrating risk in the members who have nowhere else to go.

For a Med Supp pricing or valuation desk carrying Plan F exposure, the near-term items to track are concrete. Telos Actuarial's next quarterly rate-action update will show whether the 34% to 39% closed-block filings from Humana and LifeShield National this spring were the leading edge of a broader wave or state-specific outliers; the same publisher's Q1 and Q2 releases have landed roughly six weeks apart, so a Q3 update is a reasonable near-term watch. State DOI dockets in Virginia, Michigan, and Nebraska are the ones to check for the next filing round on the same blocks, since a carrier that clears 35% or more in one cycle rarely stops there. And any Plan F block still running a flat annual lapse assumption above 3% to 4% for members past age 70 should be re-underwritten against the current filing's own magnitude before the next indication goes out the door, because the members who remain after a 35% increase are not a random sample of the members who were there before it.