How MARA Rating Company maintains, reviews, updates, and publicly accounts for its ratings — including the ones that were wrong.
Purpose
A rating issued once and never revisited is a snapshot, not a signal. This policy describes how MARA ratings are kept current when evidence changes, how the method behind them is version-controlled, and how the record — successes and failures alike — is kept in the open. The objective is a risk signal that stays stable, comparable, and defensible over time, and a track record anyone can check.
Rating Action Types
- Affirmed — rating confirmed after review; no change in band.
- Upgrade — rating moved to a higher band following materially improved evidence or reimbursement outlook.
- Downgrade — rating moved to a lower band following materially adverse evidence or reimbursement developments.
- Under Review — rating placed under review pending evaluation of a material event.
- Withdrawn — rating withdrawn only if minimum evidence requirements are no longer met, or the rating is more than five years old. Withdrawal is never used to remove an unfavourable outcome from the record.
Surveillance Framework
Every MARA rating is subject to:
- Event-driven surveillance — triggered by material clinical, economic, or policy developments.
- Periodic review — at least annually, to confirm continued alignment with the evidence and the HTA context.
Material Event Triggers (Non-Exhaustive)
- New pivotal clinical data
- New HTA decisions or payer policy updates
- Label expansions or restrictions
- Material pricing or reimbursement developments
- Significant safety findings
- Major changes in standard of care
- Documented methodological corrections
Process & Governance Controls
- Ratings are determined through structured committee judgment. No single analyst determines outcomes.
- Evidence is restricted to public, verifiable sources.
- Committee minutes are recorded.
- Issuers may correct factual errors, but cannot direct rating outcomes.
Method Versioning & Change Control
A rating is only comparable over time if the method behind it changes in the open. Every MARA methodology version is dated and identified, and the version in force at the time of each rating is recorded with that rating. The current methodology epoch is MARA 2.0, effective 11 August 2026 — a versioned, published change of yardstick. Ratings issued under earlier versions remain on the record under their version; they are not restated under a later method, and results measured under different versions are not mixed into a single track record.
Scheduled review. The Expert Committee reviews the calibration record each April. Changes are never made at the request of a rated company.
Versioned publication. Any change to domain definitions, weighting logic, or threshold bands produces a new methodology version, dated and published. Recalibrations apply prospectively only.
No silent revision. The method is never adjusted retroactively. A rating keeps the version it was issued under, whatever the subsequent outcome.
Ratings are kept current under the surveillance rules above. The method is kept current under this section. The two are governed separately because they answer different questions: whether the evidence changed, and whether the yardstick changed.
Validation Disclosure Policy
A rating that is only shown when it was right cannot be tested. MARA publishes the full performance record of its ratings once a year, on a fixed schedule, in a fixed format, regardless of what that record shows.
What is disclosed
Every published MARA Rating remains on the public MARA Ratings List with its as-of date and surveillance status, whatever the subsequent HTA decision. Anyone can place a dated rating next to the decision that followed it. That is the track record — kept in the open, one rating at a time, on a schedule the issuer does not control.
Band-level calibration results are recorded in dated Calibration Annexes. Each annex states its corpus definition, its as-of date, and its results in full — measured outcome-blind, certified by independent reviewers, and traceable to hash-manifested evidence archives. Annexes are reissued as the evidence corpus grows; superseded annexes stay on file, superseded — never edited. The current annex is available to clients and diligence counterparties on request.
As calibration against G-BA, HAS, and ICER completes under the same protocol, the same discipline extends to those markets.
What this policy does not permit
- Ratings are not withdrawn to remove an unfavourable outcome from the record. Withdrawal is limited to the conditions defined under Rating Action Types above.
- The corpus definitions and disclosure format of the Calibration Annexes are fixed in advance and are not adjusted after a result is known.
- A published rating remains on the public MARA Ratings List after issuance, whether or not the subsequent HTA decision matched it.
Why this is disclosed, not summarised
An investment committee, a board, or a lender does not need to take MARA’s word for it. It needs to be able to check. Every rating we publish stays on the record, dated, next to the decision that eventually followed it. A track record that reports only its successes is a claim; one that cannot be edited after the fact is evidence.
Relationship to the Independent Market-Access Check Standard
MARA has defined a provider-neutral standard describing what any independent market-access check should include — six criteria covering independence, consistency of method, historical testing, inspectable reasoning, an openly kept track record, and documented currency. Any assessment meeting the six criteria satisfies it.
This page documents how MARA holds itself to two of those criteria:
- A track record published openly, including the mistakes — governed by the Validation Disclosure Policy above.
- Kept current, under documented rules — governed by the Surveillance Framework, Material Event Triggers, and Method Versioning & Change Control sections above.
The remaining criteria — independence, consistency of method, historical calibration, and evidence-linked reasoning — are documented in the MARA Rating Methodology and the Rating Committee Charter.