Funny, I was just looking at that BS plan late last night; did not know it was new. I think Medicare’s open enrollment starts Oct 15, so all plans should be available by then.
One thing I’m still unclear about on the BD rule is whether we can sign up for F today (or F+), and then change to G later without medical underwriting if the F/F+ rates gets too expensive. I believe its possible, but haven’t found anything in writing.
I found my Medicare # on line almost a week before my card arrived in the mail. I also received multiple mailing saying basically the same stuff about my fees. My quarterly payment is equal to monthly cost for COBRA. I had anthem- they sent me a link for estimating cost to continue same HMO coverage- it would have been very close to what I was paying monthly for COBRA. Went with an plan that covered a bit more than what I had
H will definitely apply for # in time to start coverage in Birthday month.
Thanks everyone-OP
I’m pretty sure the birthday rule is that you can always change to a lesser plan — so you could go from F+ to G, but you couldn’t move from a G to an F.
enrolled with silverscript around Oct 3 via medicare.gov. Checked with Silversript around Oct 12, they claimed they couldn’t find my enrollment even with my confirmation number. I have to re-enroll over the phone again.
On the other hand, I received my AARP/UH insurance card.
Well I still haven’t gotten anything by paper mail, either from Social Security or Medicare, but I’ve finally managed to set up m account at medicare.gov & I saved a PDF of my Medicare card. (No point in actually printing it out at this point, since it’s not actually active until January) But I guess at this point I’m official.
I need to go to a SS Office at some point. I applied for SS and Medicare online…BUT I don’t seem to have my username or passwords written down, so of course, I can’t access anything online. They tell me, I have to appear…in person…if I want this info.
Put it on the to do list.
Have you tried this link on the Medicare.gov site?
https://www.mymedicare.gov/forgotcredentials.aspx
And here is the info for user name retrieval and password reset on the SS site: https://faq.ssa.gov/en-US/Topic/article/KA-02789
Or maybe you changed your email address since you set things up? That would pretty much break the ability to reset passwords, since any reminders would be sent to the old email.
I did it! I signed up for my part D plan online. I don’t take any drugs, so I went for the cheapest plan @ $13/month. (Last time I actually had a prescription for anything was an antibiotic in 2017, so no point for me in spending too much at this point.)
I have never changed my email… and I have tried to reset online…and can’t. I called and was told…come on in.
I’ll try one of those links, @calmom …maybe the will work, but nothing else has.
As physicians H and I are savvy about probable drugs needed for possible future conditions and current ones. Needed to plug in different scenarios for costs now and what if? costs to find the sweet spots. At least Medicare does a nice job of showing monthly and yearly costs based on drugs needed. But it is a pain to put in commonly used drugs and do only three comparisons at once. And to time out. My info also only matters where I live so I can’t offer others the results of my time online. I actually printed many pages to see what happens before/after deductibles et al.
I am not quite sure how some yearly drug costs can be so different for the same scenarios. It is worth the time to see which plans are cheapest for the individual needs. I am happy to have to pay those extra fees as well since it means I am doing well financially (unlike childhood- would have fewer dental problems now for example if parents could have afforded that). Firm believer in sharing the costs across the population.
Vote in November to keep various health care rules in effect. We benefit as a society with Medicaid and Medicare.
RX coverage is weird sometimes. My plan clearly…very clearly states that after the Medicare deductible…my generics will be 5% of the cost. I picked up a RX yesterday and the retail on it was $16.00 or so. My share was…60 cents or so. That is NOT 5%.
re above- perhaps it was 5% of their charges, which can be lower than their “retail” prices. It was/is interesting to see the info from the Medicare site that gives various retail costs and drug plan costs- they can differ a lot from pharmacy to pharmacy (don’t ask me why- same drug sold at similar volumes to same city…). At least it was LESS than you thought logical. So complicated.
Er, I wouldn’t complain.
60 cents is 5% of $12 – and $12 is 75% of $16 – so I’m just thinking that you probably wouldn’t have been charged “retail” in any case. Maybe because of regular discounts that your pharmacy passes on to all customers, or maybe because of a separate agreement the pharmacy has with the insurance company – or maybe the pharmacy has a price-match policy in place and so they commonly discount that particular drug to keep up with their competitors. .
My copay is often $0, even tho it is supposed to be some higher amount, as long as I use a preferred pharmacy and get 90 days of the Rx at a time. I haven’t complained and don’t plan to, but it sure is odd. It has gotten me and my providers more aware of the differences in copay between 30 day or 90 day Rx.
I’d add that my plan has no deductible for tier 1 & 2 (which I assume to be very commonly prescribed generics). For Tier 1, if I shop at CVS, Walgreens, or Costco, it will be $1. Tier 2, $6. If I opt to buy at the nearby Walgreens, it would be $15 or $20. I’ve usually bought from Walgreens, but I figured it’s worth driving an extra mile to go to the CVS instead. As noted above, my total RX costs for 2018 thus far have been $0. I think maybe in 2017 I paid about $20 for the year.
I like the fact that I can switch annually. If I went into “catastrophic” coverage with the plan I just signed up for, after $5100 out of pocket I’d pay at most 5% of whatever pricey drug I needed. I’ve got that covered with my now “legacy” HSA account (which I can no longer contribute to, but I can hang onto for awhile) – and I’m sure that if I needed a medication for a chronic condition that cost, say, $1000 a month, then come open enrollment time I’d be happy to switch to a higher premium D plan. Basically I assume that lower premiums equate to higher out-of-pocket… Medicare gives my company 2 stars which obviously is not encouraging … but again, I will probably never use it. I don’t know, but I assume that the 2 stars mean that customer service is lacking and that the company may be inflexible about its formulary.
I’d probably be freaking out if they didn’t have open enrollment every year.
The company I signed with (EnvisionRXPlus) is new to my area this year – so who knows. But for me, it is going from -0- for prescription drugs to $155 for the annualized premium. If there wasn’t a penalty for delayed enrollment in Plan D I’d probably skip the coverage entirely. But it looks like a very competitive marketplace – when I priced the options for 2018, the lowest cost option was about $20 a month – This year there was the $13 plan I bought and another option for $15.
I just checked again. The retail price listed on the RX is $35.99. I was charged…65 cents. Weird.
Silver Script - I have read that silver script sometimes “lost” an enrollment, hence when I enrolled in the beginning of October via medicare.gov, I called Silver Script on or around Oct 12, I gave them my confirmation number, my medicare ID etc , the person on the other side insisted that he could not find my enrollment, hence I enrolled again over the phone (post #263). Today, I received a letter from Silver Script accepting my application, the letter was dated Oct 9, it seems to me that Silver Script never “lost” my enrollment. I am not sure how the whole thing work, but if the agent gets credits for enrolling someone, I felt that he might have purposely not finding my application so that I enrolled again with him.
I couldn’t even find a way to sign up for a drug plan on the medicare.gov site – I just went straight to the plan site and signed up there.
under https://www.medicare.gov/ somewhere down the middle, “find health and drug plans”
Thanks-- but it doesn’t really matter at this point since I went to the provider site instead. I have a confirmation number from them. I’ve yet to receive my paper Medicare card in the mail, and I’m going to be traveling away from home the rest of this month … so I’ll just let things rest a couple of weeks and come back to all of this in November.
I’ve had one more nice health care surprise – my ACA subsidy has been increased so that I only have to pay $20 a month for insurance for the next 2 months. I think what happened is that I went to the Covered California site to try to report that I was starting Medicare in January (so as to prevent the automatic-renewal of my policy) – and in the course of doing that I must have clicked a button somewhere that triggered a recalculation of the subsidy. I was paying closer to $200/month before. So a little bit of a coast for me for the rest of 2018. This is for a Bronze plan with about a $5000 deductible, so for all practical purposes, no real coverage other than catastrophic. So I’m very happy to be switching to Medicare in January with the Medigap coverage – no more worrying about networks or deductibles.