Molina gets high marks for affordability and customer satisfaction and was ranked No. 9 on Insure.com’s 2024 Best Health Insurance Companies list – earning 3.7 stars out of 5.
Mel Duvall is an award-winning senior business writer and communications professional. Mel also served a three-year term on the Mount Royal University Journalism Committee.
John is the editorial director for CarInsurance.com, Insurance.com and Insure.com. Before joining QuinStreet, John was a deputy editor at The Wall Street Journal and had been an editor and reporter at a number of other media outlets where he covered insurance, personal finance, and technology.
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Molina Healthcare offers plans under Medicaid and Medicare and through the state health insurance marketplace.
It’s not available in every state, but the customers who get their insurance through Molina give it high marks for affordability and customer satisfaction. The vast majority of customers we surveyed said they would recommend the company to others.
Overall, Molina ranked No. 9 in Insure.com’s list of the Best Health Insurance Companies for 2024 with a rating of 3.7 (or, more precisely, 3.73) out of 5 stars.
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.
AM Best's Financial Strength Rating is an independent opinion of an insurer's financial strength and ability to meet its ongoing insurance policy and contract obligations.
The company, which was founded to provide low-income people with affordable healthcare, scores especially well here. It came in second behind Kaiser Permanente in this category
Below is a look at how Molina’s rates in Michigan compare with those of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan and Centene for a similar plan. These are 2024 healthcare exchange rates for a single, 40-year-old male in excellent health with an annual income of $70,000.
Molina received high scores among the top insurers in our survey for customer satisfaction. It was rated the No. 4 company in this category, which Kaiser Permanente led.
Large competitors offer more choices. Molina’s offerings are limited to Medicaid, Medicare, or other state-sponsored plans. Generally, customers were OK with that. BCBS of Michigan led this category.
Yes, Molina ranked second (tied with Horizon) in this category with 97% of customers saying they would recommend the company to others. Molina and Horizon ranked behind BCBS of Michigan – all the BCBS of Michigan customers we surveyed said they would tell friends and family about it.
Molina has earned customers’ trust. In our survey, 77% of respondents said they trust the company. The insurer ranked fifth in this category, which Kaiser Permanente led.
The vast majority said yes. Customers seem to recognize they get good value for their money, with 94% saying they would renew with Molina. BCBS of Michigan and Highmark were the top-ranked companies here.
Molina had the fifth-highest score when customers were asked to rate its online experience. Only a few others did better. But it should be noted that none of the insurers did particularly well here.
Although Molina scores well for affordability, it didn’t score especially well for low deductibles – although it should be noted that no insurer did particularly well in this category. There was a three-way tie at the top of this category between Aetna, Cigna and HCSC, with 31% of their customers giving the companies high marks here.
Molina was the top-rated insurer in this category. A healthcare provider network is a group of doctors, specialists and hospitals that provide services to insured members at a lower cost than providers outside the network. A strong provider network can be a key consideration when shopping for a health plan. However, this was another area in which no insurer received especially high marks.
The company was founded in 1980 by C. David Molina, an emergency room doctor in Long Beach, California. Molina grew alarmed by a steady stream of patients to his emergency room for common illnesses that could have been treated in primary care centers. The patients were showing up in emergency rooms because they were being turned away from doctors who wouldn’t accept the state’s Medi-Cal health insurance.
He established a primary care clinic in Long Beach to treat low-income patients. There was a clear void to fill, and by the end of the decade, Molina became the state’s largest primary care management provider for Medi-Cal patients. Molina continued to grow and expand to other states, sticking to its roots of offering Medicare, Medicaid and other government-sponsored plans.
Molina passed away in 1996, but the company and the concept continue to live on. Today, Molina has 5.1 million members and operates in almost 20 states.
Sources:
Molina corporate information. Accessed February 2024.
C. David Molina Chair in Medicine profile, John Hopkins University. 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.