CVS, Centene Shares Tumble as Medicare Quality Ratings Drop (1)

CVS Health Corp. and Centene Corp. tumbled Friday after the companies’ Medicare health-insurance plans lost ground in US government quality ratings.

Average star ratings in the program fell across the board, the Medicare agency said Thursday, as pandemic-linked changes to how the metrics are calculated expired. The five-star rating scale is crucial to guiding Medicare members shopping for coverage, and highly rated plans get bonus payments from the government.

CVS and Centene were “outliers” and “fared much worse than average,” Cowen analyst Gary Taylor wrote in a note. While Centene had signaled earlier that the ratings were set to ...