Are there any 5-star Medicare Advantage plans in Arizona for 2027?

No, not among the plans a Peoria household can actually shop. CMS published the 2027 Star Ratings on October 8, 2026, and exactly one contract sold in Arizona earned five stars: UnitedHealthcare’s H0710, whose only Maricopa County plan is a nursing-home plan for people who live in a care facility. Every general Medicare Advantage contract on the Maricopa list is rated 4.5 or lower. Four contracts carry 4.5 stars for 2027, three of them Humana’s and one Devoted Health’s, and five more carry 4. The county’s two headline moves run in opposite directions: AZ Blue and SCAN each fell from 4.5 to 3.5, UnitedHealthcare slipped from 4.5 to 4, and Humana’s three contracts all rose. By membership, the share of Maricopa general-plan members sitting on a four-star-or-higher contract went from about 52 percent under last year’s ratings to about 58 percent under this year’s.

I am writing this for Peoria, six days before Annual Enrollment opens, because the stars are the one column of the plan comparison that changed this week. Everything else on the Maricopa list, premiums, caps, networks, the eight plans that ended, has been public since late September. The ratings landed Thursday, they are on Medicare.gov’s plan finder now, and the first thing to know about them is which year they describe. The 2027 star is a score for how the contract performed on CMS’s measures in 2025. It is not a forecast and it is not a grade for your doctor.

What CMS published on October 8

CMS rated 508 Medicare Advantage drug-plan contracts for 2027, against 516 for 2026. Fifteen contracts earned five stars overall, down from 22 last year. Sixty-five earned 4.5 and 108 earned 4, so 188 contracts, about 37 percent, sit at four stars or higher. Weighted by how many people are actually in them, CMS says about 71 percent of Medicare Advantage drug-plan members nationwide are in a four-star-or-higher contract for 2027. The enrollment-weighted average is 3.99 stars, against 4.01 for 2026, which is to say the national picture barely moved. Analysts who read CMS’s cut points before the release expected flat results, and flat is what arrived.

Two things changed underneath the flat average. CMS added two drug-safety measures this year, one on concurrent use of opioids and benzodiazepines and one on multiple anticholinergic medications in older adults, and it tripled the weight on the two measures that ask members whether their physical and mental health improved or held steady. A contract’s rating can move for reasons that have nothing to do with the clinic you walk into, and this was a year with more such reasons than most.

Stand-alone drug plans tell a separate story. CMS rated 41 of them, none at five stars, and says about 22 percent of drug-plan members are in a four-star-or-higher contract for 2027, up from 2 percent a year ago. More on the Arizona drug plans further down, because they are the plans a Medicare Supplement household in Vistancia actually holds.

Every Maricopa County contract, 2026 rating against 2027

A star rating belongs to a contract, not a plan. Every plan sold under one contract number carries the same overall rating, which is why the table below is organized by contract and lists the general plans each one sells in Maricopa County for 2027. The 2027 column is from the CMS Summary Ratings data table released October 8. The 2026 column is the rating carried in the CMS 2026 landscape file, which is the star you have seen on these plans all year. Membership is September 2026 Maricopa County enrollment in the contract’s general plans, from the CMS monthly file.

Source: CMS 2027 Star Ratings Data Tables, Summary Ratings (October 8, 2026); CMS CY2026 and CY2027 Landscape files, Maricopa County MA-PD rows with the SNP indicator set to No; CMS CPSC enrollment file, September 2026. Enrollment is summed across each contract's general plans in Maricopa County and excludes special needs plans. Aetna's H3931 contract, whose two Maricopa plans ended, is rated 3.5 for 2027 and is omitted.

Counting plans rather than contracts, 25 of the 45 general plans on the 2027 Maricopa list sit on a four-star-or-higher contract, against 15 of 46 a year ago. By members, 58 percent of the county’s September general-plan enrollment is on a contract rated four or higher for 2027, against 52 percent under the 2026 ratings. The county got more four-star plans this year, not fewer. It just did not get a five.

The one five-star contract in Arizona is a nursing-home plan

CMS’s high-performing table lists 15 contracts nationally, and one of them sells in Arizona: UnitedHealthcare’s H0710, rated 5 overall with a Part C summary of 4.5 and a Part D summary of 5. Its Maricopa plan is the UHC Nursing Home Plan, an institutional special needs plan, which means it is open only to people who live in, or are expected to live for at least 90 days in, a nursing facility. It had 549 Maricopa members in September. It is a real five-star contract and it is irrelevant to a household in Trilogy at Vistancia comparing HMOs.

That matters because of the five-star rule. Medicare.gov says you can switch into a five-star plan using a Special Enrollment Period only once between December 8 and November 30 of the following year, and only if one is available in your area. The five-star exception exists; for a general Medicare Advantage shopper in Maricopa County in 2027, there is nothing on the other side of the door. If someone tells you they can move you into a five-star plan outside Annual Enrollment, ask for the contract number and check it against the list above.

Who moved, and what a move means

Down. AZ Blue’s Blue Best Life contract went from 4.5 to 3.5, with a Part C summary of 3.5 and Part D of 4. AZ Blue announced the 4.5 last October, and 31,625 Maricopa members sit on the contract. SCAN’s H1822 made the same move, 4.5 to 3.5. UnitedHealthcare’s H0609, the largest contract in the county by a wide margin at 72,178 members, went from 4.5 to 4, with its Part C summary at 3.5. Aetna’s H5521 PPO contract went from 4.5 to 4, which bears on the Aetna Medicare Elite members whose plan ended: the two Aetna PPOs that continue were on a 4.5-star contract when the non-renewal letters were written and are on a 4-star one now. Banner’s Prime contract went from 3.5 to 3. Devoted’s H7993, the contract behind the three new Devoted HMOs in the county, came in from five stars elsewhere to 4.5.

Up. All three Humana contracts rose. Gold Plus H0028, 36,663 members, went from 3.5 to 4.5; Total Complete H4461 from 4 to 4.5; the HumanaChoice PPO contract H5216 from 3.5 to 4. Devoted’s Arizona HMO contract H8173 went from 3.5 to 4, its PPO contract from 3 to 3.5, Wellpoint from 3 to 3.5, and Humana’s regional PPO from 2.5 to 3. Humana is discontinuing plans across the country for 2027 while its Maricopa line-up grows from ten plans to eleven; the ratings move is the other half of that story.

Held. HealthSpring’s H0354, the second-largest contract in the county at 54,945 members, stayed at 3.5, which means the renamed Preferred HMO and the ended Preferred HMO carry the same star, as they always did. Alignment held at 4, Wellcare at 3.5, Humana’s H7617 PPO contract at 4.5.

Now the part I say to everyone at the kitchen table. A move from 4.5 to 3.5 on a contract is a fact about how that contract scored on CMS’s measures in 2025, under a measure set that changed for this release. It is not a fact about the HonorHealth or Banner physician you see, whose practice participates in several of these contracts at once and delivered the same care to all of them. The plans on the AZ Blue contract are in the 2027 file, their members got an Annual Notice of Change in September and not a non-renewal letter, and nothing about the HonorHealth relationship changed on Thursday. Conversely, a contract rising to 4.5 did not add your cardiologist to its directory. The star is one column.

What the star measures, and what it cannot tell you

CMS builds the rating from up to 43 measures for a Medicare Advantage drug-plan contract. They fall into groups: whether members got screenings, vaccines and tests; how well diabetes, blood pressure and other chronic conditions were managed; what members said on surveys about getting appointments and care quickly; complaints, members leaving and plan performance problems; customer service, including how appeals were handled and how quickly; and for the drug side, pricing accuracy and whether members stayed on their diabetes, blood-pressure and cholesterol medications. The data comes from claims, medical records, member surveys and CMS’s own monitoring, and it describes the year before last.

What is not in there is the thing most of my north Peoria clients need most: whether the specialist they drive to at Arrowhead or in Sun City is in a given plan’s 2027 network, and whether the drug they fill in January sits on a tier they can live with. How Medicare Advantage networks actually work covers why a logo in a directory is not an answer, and nothing in the star rating substitutes for the check. A four-star plan that covers your doctors beats a 4.5-star plan that does not, every time, and the stars are close enough in this county that the network will decide it far more often than the rating will.

The rating does carry one practical consequence for you. A contract at four stars or higher earns a quality bonus payment from Medicare, and that money funds benefits. A contract that loses the bonus has less to spend. That shows up in the 2028 plan year, not this one, and whether it shows up as a higher cap, a thinner dental benefit or nothing visible at all is the carrier’s decision a year from now. It is a reason to review every October, which you should be doing anyway. It is not a reason to leave a plan whose network and formulary fit you today.

If your plan was discontinued and its stars were part of why you chose it

Eight general plans ended in Maricopa County for 2027, and the one that carried a 4.5 was Aetna Medicare Elite. If a rating was part of why you chose a plan, it is natural to shop the replacement by rating first. I would resist that, in this order.

1. Your specialists first, from twelve months of statements. Nine contracts on the Maricopa list are rated four stars or higher for 2027, which is 25 plans. There is no shortage of rated plans. The shortage is plans whose 2027 directory holds the cardiologist in Sun City and the orthopedist at Arrowhead by name. What to do when your plan is discontinued in Peoria has the full check order.
2. Then the cap and the drug deductible against your own worst year. Those are plan-level numbers and they vary widely inside a single contract. The three Devoted plans on the 4.5-star H7993 contract, for instance, carry in-network caps of $2,900, $5,550 and $8,850. Same star, three very different years if you are hospitalized.
3. Then the ZIP. Peoria quotes pull from the ZIP, and the Peoria–Glendale–Sun City seam is stitched tightly enough that two houses a mile apart are offered different line-ups. The star rating is the one thing that is the same on both sides of the seam, because it belongs to the contract and the contract is rated once for every county it sells in.
4. Only then the star, to break a tie between two plans that passed the first three checks.

And the door a discontinued plan opens that a continuing plan does not: a Medicare Supplement has no star rating at all. Its benefits are standardized by federal law, so a Plan G from one carrier pays exactly what a Plan G from another pays, and it has no network, so the question of whether the Sun City practice is in it does not arise. A plan leaving Medicare is a federal guaranteed-issue situation, and from November 1, 2026 through March 4, 2027 a supplement in Plan A, B, D, G, K or L must be issued without health questions. Arizona has no birthday rule and no annual Medigap window, so this is a door that does not reopen on its own. The cost is the Part B premium of $202.90 a month in 2026 that you already pay, plus the supplement, plus a stand-alone drug plan. Plan G against Plan N for Arizona is the read if that is the direction.

The drug plans, for the supplement households

Most of my Vistancia and Westbrook Village clients on a supplement hold a stand-alone Part D plan, and those contracts are rated too, on the Part D measures alone. For the five drug-plan contracts selling in Arizona for 2027, the CMS table gives Humana’s S5884 a 4.5, Wellcare’s S4802 and UnitedHealthcare’s S5921 a 3, and Aetna’s SilverScript S5601 and the new HealthSpring Assurance Rx contract S5715 a 2.5. A 2.5 is not a reason to leave a plan whose formulary carries your prescriptions on the right tiers at your preferred pharmacy, and a 4.5 is not a reason to join one that does not. Every stand-alone drug plan carries the 2027 out-of-pocket cap on covered drugs, and the formulary and the deductible, not the star, set what you pay before you reach it. Any drug plan on the Arizona list can be chosen for any reason between October 15 and December 7.

The dates

• October 8, 2026. CMS published the 2027 Star Ratings. They are on Medicare.gov’s plan finder now; anything printed before Thursday shows the 2026 star.
• October 15 to December 7, 2026. Annual Enrollment, for Advantage and drug plans alike. The only window with a clean January 1 start.
• November 1, 2026 to March 4, 2027. The guaranteed-issue Medigap window for members of an ended plan.
• December 8, 2026 to February 28, 2027. The Special Enrollment Period for members of an ended plan.
• December 8, 2026 to November 30, 2027. The five-star Special Enrollment Period, usable once, if a five-star plan is available to you. For a general Maricopa shopper in 2027, none is.
• January 1 to March 31, 2027. The Medicare Advantage open enrollment period, one switch, for anyone who finds in January that the plan does not fit.

The short version

• No general Medicare Advantage plan in Arizona has five stars for 2027. The one five-star contract sold here is a nursing-home plan.
• Four Maricopa contracts are at 4.5 for 2027: Humana Gold Plus, Humana Total Complete, Humana’s H7617 PPOs and the new Devoted H7993 HMOs. Five more are at 4.
• AZ Blue and SCAN fell from 4.5 to 3.5. UnitedHealthcare and Aetna’s PPO contract fell from 4.5 to 4. Banner fell from 3.5 to 3. All three Humana contracts and both Devoted Arizona contracts rose.
• The county got more four-star plans, not fewer: 25 of 45 general plans, against 15 of 46 last year, and 58 percent of members by headcount against 52.
• The 2027 star describes 2025 performance on CMS’s measures, under a measure set that changed this year. It is not a grade for your doctor and it does not reach the 2027 directory.
• Doctors, cap and drugs, ZIP, then the star. A supplement has no star because it has no network to rate.

If you would rather have someone check it for you

Bring your cards, your letter if you got one, and the pill bottles. I will tell you which contract your plan sits on and what its 2027 star is, run your doctor list against the 2027 directories for every plan in your ZIP, and put your prescriptions through each plan’s deductible so you see the full-year number and not the star. It takes about half an hour and there is no charge for the conversation. I am independent, so the answer can be the plan you are on, any other plan on the county list, or a supplement if the window is open to you.

I work with people across Peoria and on the Glendale side of the seam, where many of the same specialists are. The office is in Anthem, roughly 25 minutes from north Peoria out the Carefree Highway and down Lake Pleasant Parkway, and most of this gets done by phone. Call (602) 844-6002 or book a time — and if you call or text, that is your consent for me to reply the same way.