Going. Going. Gone!

Medicare Advantage plans are popular, with more than half of all eligible Medicare beneficiaries enrolled in them in 2026, according to KFF. People like their lower up-front costs and the fact that they bundle Part A, Part B and (usually) Part D prescription drug coverage into a single plan managed by a private insurer. But not everyone who wants to enroll in a Medicare Advantage plan can do so, however, and an increasing number of people are finding themselves in counties without a single option listed for 2027. Sixty-seven US counties currently have no general-enrollment Medicare Advantage plans listed for next year after having at least one in 2026, according to a new analysis published by MoneyGeek. That brings the projected total to 181 counties — many but not all of them rural — that won’t have any Medicare Advantage plans next year.

It’s a bummer for fans of Medicare Advantage who may soon be missing out, but the good news is that people still have options even if their current plan shuts down. They can join another Medicare Advantage plan if one is available, and if not, they will automatically return to original Medicare.

Bye Bye Bye

The disappearance of Medicare Advantage plans is driven primarily by economic factors. The plans are run by private, for-profit corporations rather than the federal government, and companies are exiting counties outright or dropping unprofitable plans. Major carriers like Humana and UnitedHealthcare are cutting losses, per Washington Post reporting.

MoneyGeek’s research gets into the specifics:

• Up to 2.9 million (about 13.5%) general-enrollment Medicare Advantage members whose plans are closing next year live in a county without any successor plans identified for 2027.
• It’s a more acute problem in rural areas, where about one in five members have no options for 2027, compared with one in eight in metro areas.

Minnesota has the largest share of beneficiaries affected, where some 342,000 members will soon see their Medicare Advantage options disappear, according to the research.

Because more people are using care and costs are rising, Medicare Advantage options are likely to continue to disappear, said Nathan Paulus, head of marketing and brand partnerships at MoneyGeek. Advisors in rural markets should take particular care to inform clients about their options.

What Now? Those losing their Medicare Advantage plans will be automatically enrolled in original Medicare. They still have to sign up for a separate Medicare Part D plan to cover prescription drugs, and failing to do so can result in many thousands of dollars of extra costs, Paulus warned. Likewise, if a client’s Medicare Advantage plan was terminated, they will receive special federal or state rights to buy a Medigap policy without health underwriting.

Let’s get personal.

It’s been two decades since the Pension Protection Act began allowing managed accounts to serve as a default investment in 401(k) plans. Retirement researchers have been analyzing the pros and cons ever since, including Jack VanDerhei, director of retirement studies for the Morningstar Center for Retirement & Policy Studies, who just published his fourth paper of the year about managed accounts. The new study asks two questions that are easily conflated: Does a managed account perform better in a bad market, and does its relative value increase as market outcomes become more adverse? The answer to both is yes, though there are some important caveats.

“The real issue is not whether managed accounts provide downside protection in the abstract, but where and relative to what alternative do they have the greatest opportunity to improve outcomes,” VanDerhei told Retirement Upside.

Managed Account Value

There’s no single right answer to what vehicle people should use to save for retirement, his research has concluded. Still, managed accounts bring a lot to the table, per the 2026 series:

• The first study found a meaningful increase in the age-65 median wealth-to-salary ratio from using a managed account, even after a 40-basis-point management fee.
• The second examined why that value varies across retirement plans. Managed accounts proved more valuable when the plans didn’t automatically increase workers’ contribution rates.
• The third study found that managed-account use was generally associated with higher contributions.

“The incremental value of a managed account depends substantially on what the [saver] would otherwise be doing,” VanDerhei said. “Someone already invested in an appropriate target-date fund is in a very different position from someone managing a poorly diversified portfolio on their own.”

Still, both groups benefit on average from managed account usage, according to the new report, which shows hypothetical participants who start using managed accounts in their early 20s reach retirement with 9.9% more wealth than target-date fund investors and 22% more than those with self-directed portfolios.

Still, managed accounts aren’t exactly in great demand. About 44% of retirement plans include a professionally managed account as an investment vehicle in 2026, up from 38% in 2024, according to the Plansponsor Defined Contribution Benchmarking Survey.

Death of DIY? Managed account users tend to accumulate more wealth than DIY retirement investors, but VanDerhei is hesitant to draw broad conclusions.

“Our results do not establish that all DIY investors are making poor investment decisions,” he said. “Some participants are perfectly capable of constructing and maintaining appropriate portfolios. However, the findings do suggest that there can be substantial advantages to professionally managed investment approaches, particularly when compared with the investment and contribution patterns associated with self-directed participants.”

More investors want an invite to the private asset party.

Over half of investors in 401(k)s and similar workplace retirement plans say they’d put money in private assets if offered, up from 45% in 2025 and 36% in 2024, according to a recent Schroders survey.

Private investments are increasingly making their way into everyday investors’ portfolios as new products offer access with lower minimums and more liquidity. While less than 1% of the $14 trillion in assets in defined contribution plans are in private assets, the Bipartisan Policy Center found, that’s likely to change as plan providers like Empower and State Street look for new ways to introduce private assets to retirement savers.

“It’s hard to argue against providing access,” said Jean-Pierre Aubry, associate director of retirement plans and finance at the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. “But of course, it comes with responsibility.”

Worth It?

Private assets come with potentially high fees, opaque valuations and illiquidity. And, they may not actually provide investors with what they’re looking for:

• Seventy-seven percent of plan participants say private assets offer an opportunity for greater investment return, and 78% said private assets enhance a 401(k)’s diversification, Schroders found.
• But the dispersion of performance for private assets is really wide, Aubry said. With public equities, the difference between the best active manager of a fund and the worst active manager of a fund is not that large. “Private assets are a whole different ballgame,” Aubry added. “Once you get out of the top quartile, it’s a bloodbath. It’s really hard to pick winners, and if you don’t pick winners, you end up with a real loser.”
• He’s skeptical about the diversification benefits, too. “In a place like America, where we have a very deep and broad public market, the idea that there’s like a whole diversified sector out there that can only be accessed through private assets is really hard for me to imagine.”

Looking Ahead. It takes a lot for an investment to make it into a retirement plan, since a plan fiduciary needs to give it the go ahead. “401(k) assets are probably among the most carefully considered assets available in the world,” said Josh Lichtenstein, head of the ERISA fiduciary practice at law firm Ropes & Gray. The reason we haven’t seen them in retirement plans on a wider scale is that fiduciaries have been worried about being sued, he said. But the Department of Labor has a proposed rule which should be finalized this year or early next designed to give those fiduciaries confidence that as long as they follow an appropriate process and can show their work, it should be easier for them to win those lawsuits, he said. “I think there’s genuine relief on the way there.”