Medicare Advantage at a Boiling Point
Enrollment growth has slowed, DOJ and FTC probes are widening, state regulators are pressing back on premiums, and providers are bracing for another round of contract battles. For CEOs and CFOs, Medicare Advantage has moved from “growth engine” to “margin risk.”
At the center of it all: the cost of acquiring, keeping, and engaging MA members. And that cost runs straight through marketing.
The Shift
What this means for operators:
Margins under siege: Rising acquisition costs and higher churn are erasing the economics that once made MA irresistible to investors and boards.
Trust deficit: Physicians and hospitals are pushing back on plan practices; members are more skeptical than ever of restrictive networks and prior authorization.
CFOs in control: With every dollar under scrutiny, marketing spend is on trial. Activity doesn’t cut it. Only ROI does.
The old playbook—big campaigns, broad targeting, disconnected brand and performance teams—no longer works. Marketing has become the front line of Medicare Advantage viability.
The Move
Treat marketing as a precision growth operation—not a cost center.
Here’s how forward-leaning CEOs and CFOs are shifting now:
Rebuild the growth model
Break down silos between brand and performance marketing. Create a unified system that aligns campaigns with enrollment and retention outcomes—not vanity metrics.Demand financial discipline
Require dashboards that translate marketing performance into hard ROI: cost per member acquisition, retention lift, and lifetime value.Optimize operations for scale
Streamline workflows and eliminate duplication across internal teams, agencies, and vendors. Every wasted step adds to acquisition cost.Reframe brand as an economic lever
In MA, brand is not soft. Trust reduces churn, lowers acquisition cost, and strengthens provider alignment.
“SPIRTO Insight: In our work, health plans that integrated brand and performance marketing into a single growth system improved ROI on Medicare Advantage campaigns by 20–30% within a single enrollment cycle..”
Closing Thought
Medicare Advantage is no longer a guaranteed growth engine. The operators who win in this market won’t simply have sharper actuaries or tighter contracts—they’ll have marketing systems built for precision, accountability, and ROI.
Because when the economics shift, marketing isn’t overhead. It’s survival.