Centene filed a lawsuit on October 22, 2026, accusing the Department of Health and Human Services and CMS of using 17 measures it had no legal authority to apply when it scored the company’s 2027 Medicare Advantage Star Ratings. The complaint says those measures cut Centene’s payments by about $448 million across more than three dozen Medicare Advantage contracts.
The timing matters because CMS had already published the 2027 ratings on October 8, and Centene is asking a federal judge to undo them. The company says nearly every one of the affected contracts would have received a higher rating without the disputed measures, and that two of them would have cleared the three-star threshold that can trigger a public warning on CMS’s Medicare Plan Finder.
That threshold is not cosmetic. Plans that land below three stars are flagged publicly, and three straight years with that warning can give CMS the power to cancel the contract entirely. Centene says it is fighting for 35 subsidiaries and more than three dozen contracts, all of which were judged under the same framework it is now challenging.
The lawsuit leans heavily on a ruling from May 2026 in Clover Insurance Co. v. HHS, when the same court found that 20 measures CMS used to score Clover’s 2026 Star Ratings were unlawful and ordered the agency to redo those ratings without them. Centene says CMS then voluntarily dropped those same measures from Clover’s 2027 scores but kept using the same types of measures for every other health plan in the country, including Centene.
That is the sharpest part of the case. CMS accepted the court’s reasoning for one plan, then applied a version of the same approach to everyone else. If the judge agrees, Centene could force a recalculation of its 2027 Star Ratings and reopen a payment dispute worth hundreds of millions of dollars. If the court does not, the ratings — and the money attached to them — stand.
