Medicare Advantage enrollment is locked for most of the year by design. Outside a short list of exceptions, a beneficiary chooses a plan in the autumn and lives inside that choice until the following autumn. One group of Rhode Island patients is currently standing outside that lock, and the exception closes on August 31, 2026. The opening was not a courtesy from an insurer; it is the federal response to a contract breakdown that pushed a large physician network out of a UnitedHealthcare Medicare Advantage plan.
The physician split that followed a hospital split
The break happened in two waves, a year apart. The first hit the hospitals: a similar breakdown in contract negotiations over Brown University Health hospitals in 2025 sent those hospitals out of network. The second reached the doctors.
The Rhode Island Attorney General’s office states the 2026 event directly on its consumer page on the dispute: “Brown University Health and UnitedHealthcare have announced that, absent a breakthrough in contract negotiations, Brown University Health physician offices will no longer accept UnitedHealthcare Medicare Advantage plans as of July 1, 2026.” That page carries a last-updated date of June 17, 2026, and no settlement between the two organizations has been announced since.
Attorney General Peter F. Neronha put the household consequence in blunt terms. “Once again, patients are caught in the middle of a contract dispute they had no role in creating,” he said. “When negotiations like this break down, the cost, literally and figuratively, is borne by older adults and people with complex medical needs who suddenly have to worry about whether they can keep seeing their doctors or afford their care.”
The special enrollment period and the three ways to qualify for it
The escape hatch is federal, not local. As the attorney general’s page states, “CMS has approved a SEP permitting affected beneficiaries the option to switch their Medicare enrollment sooner rather than wait for annual open enrollment.” Letters from UnitedHealthcare giving notice of the special enrollment period were to be sent to affected beneficiaries starting on June 17, 2026, and the window runs from the date the letter is received through August 31, 2026…