Medicare doesn't publicly score plans on prior authorization burden, so there's no official ranking. However, prior authorization requirements vary by plan and change yearly. Checking a plan's Evidence of Coverage document is the most reliable way to understand how often authorizations are required.
Prior authorization means a plan requires your doctor to get approval before a service, procedure, or medication is covered. It's one of the most common frustrations people have with Medicare Advantage plans. Some plans require authorization for a long list of services. Others apply it more narrowly. Unfortunately, Medicare doesn't publish a simple comparison showing which plans use prior authorization most or least often. What you can do is read the Evidence of Coverage document for any plan you're considering. It's a detailed document, but it spells out which services need approval before you receive them. You can also ask your doctor's office which plans create the most administrative friction. Physicians and their billing staff deal with prior authorization daily and often have strong opinions about which plans are harder to work with. It's also worth noting that CMS, which is the federal agency that oversees Medicare, has been tightening rules around prior authorization in recent years, requiring faster response times and greater transparency. That means the landscape is shifting, and a plan's track record from a few years ago may not reflect how it operates today. Verify current details directly with the plan before enrolling.
Your doctors at Intermountain Health or University of Utah Health may have informal knowledge about which plans create the most delays for their patients. That's a genuinely useful signal. Utah's ADRC counselors, who provide free Medicare guidance through the SHIP program, can also help you read through plan documents if the details feel overwhelming.
For you, this means asking your specialist or primary care doctor which insurance plans cause them the fewest headaches, because that ground-level experience is often the most honest data available.
Our Commitment to Reliable Medicare Information
At Resting Sycamore Advisors, we work to provide accurate, current, and trustworthy information about Medicare Advantage, Medicare Part D, and Special Needs Plans.
To do that, we use data published by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), which is the official source for Medicare plan and enrollment information.
Our Medicare plan pages and comparison tools are powered by CMS datasets, including:
When possible, we link to the original CMS resources so you can review the source material directly.
We follow the CMS release schedule and update our website as new data becomes available.
We load new plan year Landscape and PBP files before the Medicare Annual Enrollment Period (October 15 through December 7). We also monitor CMS.gov for updates or revisions and refresh our content when needed.
We update enrollment and performance data as CMS publishes revised files, which are typically released monthly or quarterly.
We routinely monitor CMS announcements for corrections, reissued files, or other changes and update our pages accordingly.
Each plan page includes a Last Accessed date so visitors can see when the source information was most recently reviewed.
CMS data can be difficult to read in raw form. To make it easier to use, we format and organize the data for clarity.
This includes:
All data values come from CMS. We do not change the underlying values beyond formatting, organization, and presentation.
We keep internal records of the CMS dataset versions used on our site.
If CMS issues corrected or revised files, we update our website to reflect the latest available version.
Please keep the following in mind:
For personalized Medicare assistance, please use these official resources: