Anthem / Elevance / Carelon

Yes. Carelon Behavioral Health is the rebrand of Beacon Health Options — the same organization under a new name, not a successor or a new vendor. The chain runs: Beacon Health Strategies and ValueOptions merged to form Beacon Health Options; Anthem acquired Beacon (closing in 2020); Anthem, Inc. rebranded as Elevance Health in 2022; and Beacon was rebranded as Carelon Behavioral Health, Elevance's behavioral health arm. Different names on the letterhead over the years, one continuous entity — which is why a contract that says “Beacon” is a Carelon contract today.

Carelon. Under Elevance, behavioral health for its plans — including the Anthem-brand Blue Cross Blue Shield plans offered in 14 states — is administered by Carelon, and the behavioral health network contract sits with Carelon rather than with the Blue whose name is on the member's card. This is the classic carve-out structure: the medical plan and the behavioral health administrator are affiliates, but a facility contracting for Elevance-plan behavioral health contracts with Carelon. Credentialing, the network agreement, and utilization management for behavioral health run through Carelon Behavioral Health's provider channels. If you only look for “an Anthem contract,” you will miss the entity that actually governs your behavioral health rates.

Treat it as a live Carelon relationship until Carelon tells you otherwise. Because Carelon is Beacon under a new name, legacy Beacon paperwork is not a dead artifact — it is the contract, and its terms, rates, and covered products carry forward unless they have been amended, renewed, or terminated since. Two practical consequences: don't start a “get in-network with Carelon” process from scratch if you already hold a Beacon agreement — you are already in that relationship; and don't assume the rates in that paperwork still reflect the market, because a contract negotiated under the Beacon name may be several years old. The first step is to pull the agreement, confirm with Carelon which products and levels of care it covers today, and then find out where those rates stand.

There is no single “Carelon rate.” A negotiated facility rate depends on the level of care (detox, residential, PHP, IOP, inpatient psychiatric — with eating-disorder programs billed on the same level-of-care structure), the contract's payment structure (per diem, case rate, or percent of charges), the plan and product behind the member (an Anthem-brand Blue commercial plan versus another Elevance line), your market, and when the rate was last negotiated — a legacy Beacon rate can lag today's market considerably. Billing structure decides what the rate attaches to: facility claims are keyed to revenue codes and HCPCS — residential under revenue codes 1001/1002 or H0018, partial hospitalization under 0912/0913 or H0035, intensive outpatient under 0905/0906 or H0015, detox under 0126 or H0010 — and two rates on the same code are only comparable when the rest of the contract structure matches.

By comparing actual negotiated facility rates on the same code, level of care, and market — never a blended average, and never a modeled estimate. Carelon is a national facility book in TierBench's coverage, and our most fully captured network: actual negotiated facility rates across detox, residential, PHP, IOP, and inpatient psychiatric care, extracted from Carelon's public Transparency in Coverage files and resolved to the facility. That means a facility can see where its Carelon rate sits as a percentile position among comparable facilities in its market, by level of care — and, because Carelon is one of the two largest behavioral health networks in the country, that position is one of the most consequential numbers in its payer mix. The fastest way to get it is a free rate analysis of your own contract.