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Fiascos and Fixes
New rules may finally reduce the problem of Medicare Advantage plans that deny patients treatment. They also could temper the content of those annoying Medicare Advantage commercials on TV.
There’s a lot of confusion about whether you are required to join Medicare when you turn 65. Unfortunately, depending on who you ask, the answer you get may be wrong.
Recently, my wife and I had lunch with some long-time friends. He’s retired and enrolled in Medicare. She will soon turn 65 but does not plan to retire for at least another two years. The health insurance coverage she has through her work is fine.
She told us that she had attended a retirement planning session offered at her workplace, where the presenter said you must enroll in Medicare at age 65. She wanted to know if that was true. I told her that if the presenter actually said that, then she received some bad information.
Then just last week, an acquaintance asked me that same question.
So the purpose of this article is to give you the real answer, which is: “It depends.”
Ben Franklin famously said, “A penny saved is a penny earned.” How about saving nearly $1,000? That’s how much my wife’s sister-in-law saved just by comparing Medicare prescription drug plans.
If this were an advertising scam, the headline might say, “Click here to find out how she earned $1,000 in less than an hour.”
But this isn’t some kind of advertising sales come-on. There is a real way to save money on your annual Medicare costs that most people overlook: shopping around for the best plan.
When Medicare beneficiaries Maureen Niland and her husband booked their last Holland America cruise, their thoughts were on new adventures — not medical insurance. But tragedy struck just hours after the ship left the port in Ft. Lauderdale. John Niland suffered a sudden cardiac arrest and died.
Bob Miller of Columbus, OH, needed cataract surgery on both eyes. He had the surgery on the first eye, but the evening before he was to have the second eye done, he got a phone call from his ophthalmologist. Miller’s Medicare Advantage plan had just informed the doctor that it was not authorizing the second surgery and she told him that she had to cancel the procedure.
“I was dumbfounded,” Miller told me. “It wasn’t like this would be a surprise to them. I have two eyes.”
According to the Office of the Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services, Medicare loses $60 billion annually to fraud, scams, waste, and abuse.
Scammers are counting on your confusion about Medicare’s complex rules so you go along with their fraudulent schemes.
The lost money is bad enough. But some of those Medicare scams can harm you personally. Read on for important tips so that you won’t fall for Medicare scams and contribute to this problem.