Presbyterian Healthcare Services is cutting 135 jobs, mostly inside its health plan and administrative ranks, in a second round of layoffs since summer.
The not-for-profit, which operates nine hospitals across New Mexico, tied Thursday's cuts to its decision to leave most Medicare Advantage plans and to a drop in overall membership, KOB reported. Employees were notified the same day.
Who Is Leaving, And Who Is Not
The latest reductions land primarily in Presbyterian Health Plan, not on the floors of its hospitals and clinics. Presbyterian said clinical and patient-care roles are not part of this round.
Most of the affected employees are expected to stay on for the coming months, still answering to members and finishing the transition work that a plan exit creates. Some were to leave Thursday. The company said it plans to offer severance and career-transition help. It has not publicly spelled out amounts or who qualifies.
This is the second major cut since Presbyterian eliminated about 150 health-plan and administrative positions, a reduction Searchlight New Mexico reported in June. The pattern is administrative, not bedside: insurance operations shrinking while the hospital side is held out of the layoff notice.
Thirty Thousand Members, One Plan That Stays
Presbyterian said in June it would discontinue most Medicare Advantage plans in 2027. That exit is expected to affect about 30,000 health-plan members.
It is not a full retreat from Medicare. The system plans to keep its Medicare Advantage Dual Plus special needs plan, which covers people who receive both Medicare and Medicaid, and to keep serving roughly 13,000 members on it. For everyone else in the plans being dropped, 2027 is the year the card changes.
Chief executive Rishi Sikka told the Albuquerque Journal in a June interview that the discontinuations were designed to stem Medicare Advantage losses. Presbyterian reported $59 million in those losses for 2025. Thursday's statement also pointed to a broader decline in membership, so the workforce cut is being sold as the staffing consequence of a smaller book of business, not only as a reaction to one product line.
A Loss That Dwarfs The Medicare Number
The Medicare Advantage figure is real, and it is not the whole balance sheet. In a December financial disclosure, Presbyterian reported a 2025 operating loss of $568.2 million. The Santa Fe New Mexican put 2025 revenue at about $6.8 billion and expenses at nearly $7.4 billion.
The red ink is older than this year's plan decision. Presbyterian lost more than $150 million in each of 2022 and 2023, years when expenses regularly outpaced revenue. It reported net income of $84 million in 2024, then the much larger 2025 miss. Nothing in the public figures isolates how much of that operating loss belonged to Medicare Advantage versus hospitals, clinics or the rest of the insurance book.
Independence is the frame Presbyterian is using for the cuts. The Thursday announcement said the layoffs were necessary to support financial strength and continued service as a local, independent, not-for-profit New Mexico organization. Officials said the reductions would help the system keep that status.
It has tried another route. In March 2023 Presbyterian announced a planned merger with Iowa-based UnityPoint Health and said the combination would reduce administrative costs. The two systems ended the deal later that year. The administrative savings that merger was supposed to produce are now being pursued, in part, by cutting the people who do the administrative work.
A National Shrinkage With Local Names
Presbyterian's members are a slice of a much larger contraction. A KFF analysis found that 4.3 million Medicare beneficiaries will have a Medicare Advantage or stand-alone prescription drug plan terminated at the end of 2026. About 3.1 million of them are in Medicare Advantage drug plans; about 1.2 million are in stand-alone drug plans.
On the provider side, the exits look different but land in the same market. Becker's Hospital Review reported that health systems dropping Medicare Advantage plans often cite prior-authorization denials and slow reimbursement. Kettering Health, for one, dropped Humana and Devoted Health Medicare Advantage for 2026 and said it would leave Anthem's network in 2027. Those are other systems' stated reasons. Presbyterian has pointed to its own plan losses, falling membership and the cost of staying independent.
The Months Between Notice And 2027
The calendar the company has set is uneven. Some of the 135 were to be gone Thursday. Most are supposed to remain through the coming months, which is when members of the plans being discontinued will need someone who still knows the file.
Hospital and clinic staffing was carved out of this notice, so the nine New Mexico hospitals are not the site of these particular cuts. The pressure sits in the insurance operation that has to wind down most Medicare Advantage coverage while keeping Dual Plus open for people on both Medicare and Medicaid.
For roughly 30,000 members, the practical date is 2027, when most of those plans are set to end. The jobs disappearing now are the first visible cost of getting there.
