The letter will arrive in October. Millions of Medicare beneficiaries will open their Annual Notice of Change, scan the new premium figure, and wonder what happened. Some will pay $5 more a month. Some will pay $20 more. A few will see their plan disappear entirely.
What happened is straightforward: the Trump administration ended the Medicare Part D Premium Stabilization Demonstration on December 31, 2026, one year earlier than originally planned. CMS announced the decision on July 28, 2026. The program had been quietly absorbing a portion of premium costs for standalone prescription drug plans since 2025. Without it, those costs flow directly to beneficiaries.
The stakes here are not small. Medicare Part D covers roughly 56 million Americans. About 25 million of them are enrolled in standalone prescription drug plans - the plans most directly exposed to this change. The rest are covered through Medicare Advantage plans with drug benefits, which have different subsidy structures. For th…
