A Humana Plan Is Leaving Kimball County for 2027

The short answer

Humana Full Access H5216-411 (PPO) is not being offered in ZIP code 69145 for the 2027 plan year. If that is the plan you have in Kimball County, your coverage under it ends when 2026 does, and you will need to choose something else.

Two things follow, and the second one is the one almost nobody is told.

If you do nothing, you are not left with nothing. Medicare's own wording: "You'll be enrolled in Original Medicare if you don't join another Medicare Advantage Plan before your current plan ends." You keep Part A and Part B. What you would not have is a drug plan, and that part matters.

And you are not down to one deadline. There is a second window specifically for people whose plan is not renewed, and it runs well past the one everybody talks about.

How to tell whether this is your plan

Look for the plan name and the contract number together. H5216-411 is the identifier that matters — the H-number and the three digits after it. It appears on your member card and on the letter the plan sends about next year.

A plan name alone is not enough to go on. Carriers run several plans with similar names in the same state, and the one leaving a ZIP code is not necessarily the one your neighbor has. Check the number.

If you cannot find the letter, the number is on the card in your wallet.

Why this happens, and why Kimball sees it more than most

We wrote last month that Kimball has a hospital, a clinic and a pharmacy, and that only one thing in that list resets every year. The hospital's Critical Access designation and the clinic's Rural Health Clinic designation are federal categories. They are set by criteria and they stay put.

A plan's service area is not like that. It is a business decision a carrier makes county by county, filed with Medicare, and redone every single year. A county of about 3,391 people, of whom roughly 30% are aged 65 or older, is a small market in a large and expensive geography. Plans come into places like Kimball and plans leave them, and neither event says anything about the county or the people in it.

That is the whole explanation. It is not a judgment about Kimball, and it is not something anybody there did.

The two windows, and the second one is the point

The Annual Enrollment Period runs October 15 to December 7. That is the window everybody writes about, and if you make a choice inside it your new coverage starts January 1.

But a plan that is not renewed opens a second window. Medicare's own description of it: when "My Medicare Advantage Plan, Medicare drug plan, or Medicare Cost Plan's contract with Medicare isn't renewed," your chance to switch runs "Between December 8 and the last day in February of the following year."

Read that again if you have been worrying about December 7. For somebody whose plan is going away, December 7 is not the last word. There is a further window running from December 8 into the end of February.

One honest caveat. Medicare lists more than one version of this, and which applies depends on how the plan's exit is classified — a contract that is not renewed, a contract Medicare ends, and a contract the plan and Medicare agree to end each carry slightly different windows. Your letter will say which situation you are in. We are not going to guess on your behalf, because guessing wrong about a deadline is the one error that actually costs somebody coverage. Bring the letter and we will read it with you, or call the Nebraska SHIP, the state's free Medicare counselling service, on 1-800-234-7119.

What doing nothing actually costs

Original Medicare is real coverage, and landing there is not a disaster. But two gaps open up that are worth understanding before you decide to let it happen by default.

No drug coverage. Original Medicare does not include Part D. If your current plan has been covering your prescriptions and you end up without a drug plan, you are paying full price at the counter from January.

A penalty that keeps running. The Part D late enrollment penalty is triggered by going 63 consecutive days without creditable drug coverage once you are eligible. It is calculated as a percentage of the national base premium for every full month you went uncovered, and it is added to your premium for as long as you have drug coverage — not for a year, not until you catch up. Which is why "I will sort it out later" is the expensive version of this.

Do not stop filling anything while you work out the coverage question. That is a conversation with your prescriber and your pharmacist, never a decision to make because of a letter from an insurance company.

What is actually left in Kimball County

There are still options in 69145 for 2027. We are deliberately not printing a list of carrier names here, for two reasons: plan availability is filed and refiled every year and a list written in October goes stale, and a page that reads like a recommendation is not what this is.

What we will say is the shape of what remains, because the shape is what tells you which conversation to have:

• There is still at least one option that combines medical and drug coverage in a single plan, which is the arrangement most people on H5216-411 are used to.
• If you have both Medicare and Medicaid, there is a type of plan built specifically for that situation, and the rules for people with both are genuinely different — more chances to change, and costs handled differently. We have written it out in what "dual eligible" actually means and on our dual eligible and Special Needs Plan page.
• If your prescriptions come through the VA, a plan without drug coverage can make sense, because you are not paying for something you already have. That is worth asking about specifically rather than assuming every plan has to include Part D.

Which of those three describes you is the first question, and it takes about a minute to answer.

The question people in Kimball actually ask first

Not "which plan is best." It is: will my prescriptions still be covered where I fill them?

Bemis Drug at 129 South Chestnut Street, on 308-235-3936, is the pharmacy in Kimball. If you are weighing options and that is where you fill, the pharmacy question is a reasonable one to ask out loud, and it has a factual answer for each plan rather than a sales answer.

We do not pick plans around pharmacies. A recommendation rests on your medication list, your doctors and your budget — and we will tell you plainly if the plan that fits you best is one that does not work the way you hoped at a particular counter. That is the honest version, and you should want it.

What to do this month

1. Find the letter and the card, and confirm the number is H5216-411.
2. Write down your medications — names and strengths, off the bottles rather than from memory. This is the single thing that changes a plan comparison from guesswork into arithmetic.
3. Write down your doctors, including anybody in Scottsbluff, Sidney or Cheyenne you see regularly.
4. Then compare. Not before. A comparison without the list is a comparison of brochures.

Where this comes from

Haven Health Plans was started by the pharmacists at Good Day Pharmacy, which operates a network of local community pharmacies across Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska. Bemis Drug is one of them, which is why a Medicare agency in Colorado is writing a page about one ZIP code in the Nebraska panhandle.

There is no charge for a review, and if what you need is somebody to read your letter out loud and tell you what it actually says, that is a perfectly good reason to call.