Centene pushes food as medicine

Food is becoming an insurance fight. Not in the vague wellness-program sense — in the very literal sense of whether Medicare Advantage plans can pay for medically relevant groceries and meals. Centene pushed that fight forward on May 11, asking CMS to make it easier for plans to cover nutritious food when a doctor or care team thinks it could help manage disease. ### What did Centene actually ask for? Centene’s ask is pretty specific. It wants CMS to recognize nutritious food as a “primarily health related” supplemental benefit in Medicare Advantage, which would make it easier for plans to offer than it is now. Centene also wants guardrails — basically, if plans cover food, the benefit should line up with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and exclude clearly unhealthy categories. (centene.com) ### Why is that a big deal? Because Medicare Advantage already allows extra benefits, but not all extras are treated the same. Some are relatively straightforward to offer. Nutritious food often gets pushed into the Special Supplemental Benefits for the Chronically Ill bucket — usually shortened to SSBCI — which is narrower and comes with more constraints. Centene’s argument is that food should not be trapped there if it is being used as a clinical tool. (centene.com) ### What’s broken in the current setup? The gap is that “food as medicine” sounds simple, but reimbursement rules are not. Plans can offer meal-related benefits in some cases, yet broad coverage for healthy food tied to medical need is still hard to structure and justify. Centene says that leaves a lot of potential value on the table for members with chronic conditions, who make up most of its Medicare Advantage population. (centene.com) ### Why does Centene think food belongs in medical care? The company is framing nutrition as chronic-disease management, not charity. That is the whole strategy. If better food access helps members manage diabetes, heart disease, or other long-running conditions, then the insurer sees it as a health intervention that could improve outcomes and maybe reduce more expensive care later. AHIP, the big insurer trade group, has been pushing a similar line and has called for broader scalability of Food Is Medicine in Medicare Advantage. (centene.com) ### Didn’t CMS just tighten rules on supplemental benefits? Yes — and that is why the timing matters. CMS’s 2025 Medicare Advantage final rule added guardrails for certain benefits available only to chronically ill enrollees, with an emphasis on evidence and clearer oversight. CMS has also been collecting more detailed supplemental-benefit data through encounter reporting and medical loss ratio reporting. So this is not a moment of loose flexibility. (centene.com) It is a moment when plans need cleaner categories and stronger justification. ### Is this just Centene, or a broader industry move? It looks broader. The Hill framed Centene’s move as a major insurer backing the “food as medicine” idea, and AHIP has already published policy recommendations aimed at scaling these benefits in Medicare Advantage. That doesn’t mean CMS will say yes. But it does mean this is becoming a coordinated payer push, not a one-off corporate opinion piece. (cms.gov) ### Why does Medicare Advantage matter here? Because Medicare Advantage is one of the few places in Medicare where plans have room to experiment with nontraditional benefits. Over the past five years, supplemental benefits have grown considerably, and CMS says per-person payments for them have more than doubled. That makes MA the natural testing ground for whether food can move from pilot-program logic into a standard insured benefit. (thehill.com) ### So what happens next? The real question is whether CMS agrees that nutritious food can be defined tightly enough to count as medical care without turning into a generic grocery subsidy. That is the policy hinge. If CMS opens that door, insurers get a much clearer path to build food benefits at scale. If not, “food as medicine” stays stuck in the narrower, harder-to-use corners of Medicare Advantage. (cms.gov) The bottom line is simple. Centene is trying to turn nutrition from a nice extra into a reimbursable clinical tool. Whether that works depends less on the slogan than on CMS’s willingness to redraw the rules. (centene.com)