BCBS of Michigan tied with Aetna for 10th place on Insure.com’s 2024 Best Health Insurance Companies list – earning 3.66 stars out of 5.
Insurance expert Mel Duvall is an award-winning business journalist with a background in covering insurance, banking and personal finance. His work has appeared in leading publications such as The Financial Post, American Banker and Baseline Magazine.
John McCormick is an insurance expert and the editorial director for QuinStreet's insurance sites -- CarInsurance.com, Insurance.com and Insure.com. Before joining QuinStreet, he was a deputy editor at The Wall Street Journal and was an editor and reporter at several media outlets where he covered insurance, personal finance and technology.
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Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan ranks highly as a good all-around health insurance provider. The company had the highest rating for policy offerings, recommendations and renewals in our survey of health insurance customers.
It received a strong 4 out of 5 stars from the National Committee for Quality Assurance. NCQA evaluates healthcare plans on, among other things, member satisfaction.
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan ranked tied for 10th in Insure.com’s list of the Best Health Insurance Companies for 2024.
However, it’s largely limited to residents in the State of Michigan or employees with companies that are headquartered there.
Below is Insure.com’s review of the company. It’s based on third-party metrics and our in-depth survey of insurance customers. Find the full methodology here, including an explanation of our survey scores.
Customers didn’t rate the BCBS of Michigan as highly as other companies in our ranking for price/affordability. Kaiser Permanente received the highest rating here, followed by Molina.
Below is a look at how BCBS of Michigan’s rates in Michigan compare with those of Centene and Molina. These are 2024 healthcare exchange rates for a single, 40-year-old male in excellent health with an annual income of $70,000.
Our survey found that 85% of BCBS of Michigan’s customers think it does a good job.
It also scored well against other insurers when looking at average J.D. Power 2023 U.S. Commercial Member Health Plan Study scores for Michigan. J.D. Power measures health plans for overall customer satisfaction. The Michigan J.D. Power average is 722.
BCBS of Michigan topped this category, with almost 90% of its customers saying they’re satisfied with the policies offered.
They all would. The poll found that 100% of the insurer’s customers would recommend BCBS of Michigan to others. Horizon and Molina tied for second place in this category
The majority of its customers believe BCBS of Michigan is worthy of their trust. It ranked fourth in this category, behind only Kaiser Permanente, Highmark and Horizon.
When customers were asked if they planned to renew with BCBS of Michigan, 98% said they would. The insurer tied with Highmark for the highest rating in this category.
Just 17% of survey respondents were satisfied with BCBS of Michigan’s digital experience, which includes its website and mobile app. But it should be noted, none of the companies in our survey did especially well here.
BCBS of Michigan tied with BCBS of North Carolina and Humana for sixth in this category. Twenty-seven percent of its members said they were satisfied with the company’s deductibles. But it should be noted that none of the companies in our ranking did particularly well here. Aetna, Cigna and HCSC were in a three-way tie at the top of this category, with 31% of each company’s customers giving it a good grade.
About one-in-four BCBS of Michigan customers said they were satisfied with its provider network. The network refers to the group of doctors and hospitals providing discounted care. Molina Healthcare had the highest score of 31%, but none of the companies we ranked did particularly well here.
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan’s roots date back to 1938 when the Michigan Society for Group Hospitalization and a doctors’ organization, Michigan Medical Service, were formed. The two groups worked together to work on bills to regulate prepaid health care plans and support nonprofit hospitals.
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. “Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan.” Accessed February 2024.
Insure.com in the fall of 2023 surveyed more than 1,750 insurance consumers (1,433 people with health insurance). The survey was conducted by online market research company Slice MR.
Respondents were asked to name their insurer and then grade it in a number of categories, including ease of service and policy offerings. The percentage of respondents who said they were satisfied or very satisfied with their insurer is presented in the results.
In addition, the editors also created star rankings for each company. Respondents were asked to pick their insurer’s top three attributes out of the more than the dozen they were presented – including categories such as customer satisfaction and price/affordability. The number of responses for each of those attributes was totaled and then divided by the number of each company’s customers who responded to that survey question to create the star ranking.
Respondents were also asked if they would recommend their insurer to someone else and if they planned to renew their policies. The percentage who said yes is presented in the results.
They also were given the statement “I trust my insurance company” and asked if they strongly agreed, agreed, disagreed or strongly disagreed with the statement. The percentage of those who said they agreed or strongly agreed is presented in the results.
The editors compiled the survey results and then selected – based on the number of survey responses – the top companies for further evaluation. Insure.com needed 30 or more of a health insurer’s customers to respond to the survey for a company to be included in the ranking.
They then collected AM Best financial stability ratings and National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) ratings, which evaluate health plans on, among other things, member satisfaction.
With the help of Prof. David Marlett, Ph.D., managing director of the Brantley Risk and Insurance Center at Appalachian State University, the editors created a rating system to determine which insurance companies were best in each sector. For health insurers, we used the following weights to calculate the overall score for each company:
Each insurer was awarded from 1 to 5 stars. No insurer in our star ranking received less than 1 star and the highest possible ranking is 5 stars.
On company review pages, the editors compared the profiled insurers in various categories against the leaders in that category or against other top insurers that match up well against the profiled company in terms of size and/or coverage area.