African Daisy

Today, we met with Colton, our Medicare broker. Broker being the fancy name for insurance agent. He works for us, but gets paid by the insurance companies. The insurance companies have factored in the cost of a broker, into all their premiums. So, in a sense you are paying for a broker, if you use one or not. After the seminar that he held last week, it was natural for us to choose him. In the seminar, he dispensed general information, but when we met him today, at Panera, it was all about us.

It looks like we’ll be going with basic Medicare (Parts A & B). This is pretty much a gimme. We are going to go the Supplemental route (Plan G). We chose this over the Advantage path, for two reasons. First, because we do so much traveling. The Supplemental route is good nationwide, where as the Advantage plans are more regional. The other distinction is that it is easier to go from a Supplemental plan to an Advantage plan than visa versa, because other than at initial Medicare enrollment there are qualifying medical questions that you have to answer to be accepted into a Supplemental plan.

We chose Plan G over Plan F, the other most popular Supplemental plan that is available, because starting next year, all Plan F insurances will stop accepting new customers. If you are already enrolled in Plan F, you can keep it, but we fear that over time the dwindling and ageing insurance pool will lead to higher insurance costs.

Finally, Colton was able to find the most affordable Part D plan for Anne. Due to a miscommunication, my Part D requires another iteration, but there is still plenty of time for that. I haven’t even received my Medicare card yet.

In the end, we will get Medicare health insurance for less than half of what we are now spending on premiums for Obamacare and with much lower co-pays and deductibles too. It sounds like a win-win, because we have been carrying Obamacare insurance primarily as bankruptcy insurance, hoping that we don’t ever have to use it, because using it would double our costs. Plus, that means you are sick or injured. We’ve been lucky. Let’s hope that our luck holds.