Employer Shift to Medicare Advantage for Retiree Benefits Drives Up Program Costs, KFF Report Suggests

The share of large employers offering retiree health benefits via Medicare Advantage plans nearly doubled from 2017 to 2022, according to a new analysis of the 2022 Kaiser Family Foundation Employer Health Benefits Survey. Notably, 44% of those firms do not offer any additional health benefit options outside of MA coverage. This shift has emerged as the overall percentage of large firms offering any kind of medical retirement benefit declined dramatically from the 1980s ⁠— KFF found that 66% of large employers offered retiree health benefits in 1988, compared to 21% in 2022.

© 2025 MMIT
Carina Belles

Carina Belles

Carina has been covering public-sector health care since 2018. As a data reporter for Radar on Medicare Advantage, she creates infographics and data stories on issues impacting Medicare, Medicaid and Part D. She also develops AIS Health Daily, a free daily newsletter that showcases AIS’s strong reporting across our four publications and parent company Norstella’s suite of market access and data solutions. Prior to joining the editorial team, she managed Medicare and Medicaid data for the Directory of Health Plans, AIS’s industry-standard health coverage database. She graduated from Ohio University with a B.S. in Journalism.

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