Mel Duvall is an award-winning senior business writer and communications professional. Mel also served a three-year term on the Mount Royal University Journalism Committee.
John is the editorial director for CarInsurance.com, Insurance.com and Insure.com. Before joining QuinStreet, John was a deputy editor at The Wall Street Journal and had been an editor and reporter at a number of other media outlets where he covered insurance, personal finance, and technology.
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Customers gave Humana generally high marks for being a good all-around health insurance provider, and the company ranked fifth overall in Insure.com’s Best Health Insurance Companies for 2024.
The for-profit company, which offers coverage across the country, received high marks for affordability and for its policy offerings. Of the customer survey, 91% said they would recommend the company to others.
The company also received a strong 3.3 out of 5 stars from the National Committee for Quality Assurance. NCQA evaluates healthcare plans on, among other things, member satisfaction.
Below is Insure.com’s review of the company. It’s based on third-party metrics and an in-depth survey of insurance customers. Find the full methodology here, including an explanation of our survey scores.
AM Best's Financial Strength Rating is an independent opinion of an insurer's financial strength and ability to meet its ongoing insurance policy and contract obligations.
Humana customers rated it highly for its price and affordability. Only Kaiser Permanente and Molina had better star rankings in this category. Customers also give it high marks for having low deductibles.
Humana received more than 4 stars for its customer service. It wasn’t too far behind the top company, Kaiser Permanente, which achieved the highest ranking in this category. Humana, along with UnitedHealthcare and BCBS of North Carolina, ranked fifth in this category.
Humana, however, ranked higher than other insurers when looking at average 2023 U.S. Commercial Member Health Plan Study scores for Florida, which measure health plans for overall customer satisfaction.
Another strength for Humana is its policy offerings, with 81% of customers saying they felt it had a good selection available. It had the fourth-highest score in this category. BCBS of Michigan, Kaiser Permanente and Horizon were the only companies to do better than Humana in this category.
Yes, they would. Humana had one of the higher scores in this category, with 91% of customers saying they would recommend the company to others. Only a few companies scored better. BCBS of Michigan led this category, with 100% of its customers saying they would suggest it to friends and family.
Most customers believe they can trust Humana. Three out of four customers gave it high marks in this category. Kaiser Permanente led the ratings at 86%.
When customers were asked if they planned to renew with Humana, 91% said they would. While high, a few companies did better. BCBS of Michigan and Highmark led this category, with 98% of their customers saying they’d stick with the company.
The company’s MyHumana self-serve website offers many tools. But customers didn’t find the company’s website or online experience to be particularly strong. But then, few insurers did especially well here.
Humana had the sixth-highest rating here, in a tie with BCBS of Michigan and BCBS of North Carolina. Aetna, Cigna and HCSC led this category, with 31% of their customers giving them high marks in this category. This was another area in which no company did particularly well.
A healthcare provider network is a group of doctors, specialists and hospitals that provide services to insured members at a lower cost than providers outside the network. A strong provider network can be a key consideration when shopping for a health plan. In our survey, 22% of Humana’s customers gave it high marks for its provider network. Molina led this category, but no insurer scored particularly well here.
Humana has approximately 17 million members in its various medical benefit plans as well as about 5 million members in its specialty products. It has participated in Medicare for more than 30 years and offers Medicare Advantage plans in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.
Humana’s early beginnings were in the nursing home business.
In 1959, David Jones Sr. met Wendell Cherry during a job interview, and together they started a nursing home company. That company, known in 1968 as Extendicare, became the largest nursing home operation in the U.S.
In 1972, they decided to sell the nursing homes and focus instead on hospital ownership. In 1974, the partners changed the name of the business to Humana.
Humana moved into the health insurance business in 1984 when one of its hospitals in Arizona lost a contract with the state’s main health insurer. They later spun off the hospital operations into a separate company and eventually sold the business.
In addition to offering a range of plans to individuals and families, Humana is one of the largest providers of Medicare Advantage plans, providing coverage in all 50 states.
Humana is recognized as being particularly good at catering to seniors and offers a number of programs to assist seniors in staying fit and healthy. Its Silver Sneakers fitness program offers online classes, organized group activities and access to fitness centers across the country.
Sources:
Humana. “Humana homepage.” Accessed December 2024.
Insure.com in the fall of 2023 surveyed more than 1,750 insurance consumers (1,433 people with health insurance). The survey was conducted by online market research company Slice MR.
Respondents were asked to name their insurer and then grade it in a number of categories, including ease of service and policy offerings. The percentage of respondents who said they were satisfied or very satisfied with their insurer is presented in the results.
In addition, the editors also created star rankings for each company. Respondents were asked to pick their insurer’s top three attributes out of the more than the dozen they were presented – including categories such as customer satisfaction and price/affordability. The number of responses for each of those attributes was totaled and then divided by the number of each company’s customers who responded to that survey question to create the star ranking.
Respondents were also asked if they would recommend their insurer to someone else and if they planned to renew their policies. The percentage who said yes is presented in the results.
They also were given the statement “I trust my insurance company” and asked if they strongly agreed, agreed, disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement. The percentage of those who said they agreed or strongly agreed is presented in the results.
The editors compiled the survey results and then selected – based on the number of survey responses – the top companies for further evaluation. Insure.com needed 30 or more of a health insurer’s customers to respond to the survey for a company to be included in the ranking.
They then collected AM Best financial stability ratings and National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) ratings, which evaluate health plans on, among other things, member satisfaction.
With the help of Prof. David Marlett, Ph.D., managing director of the Brantley Risk and Insurance Center at Appalachian State University, the editors created a rating system to determine which insurance companies were best in each sector. For health insurers, we used the following weights to calculate the overall score for each company:
Each insurer was awarded from 1 to 5 stars. No insurer in our star ranking received less than 1 star and the highest possible ranking is 5 stars.
On company review pages, the editors compared the profiled insurers in various categories against the leaders in that category or against other top insurers that match up well against the profiled company in terms of size and/or coverage area.