I’m trying to decide during open enrollment. The ads make Medicare Advantage sound like the best thing since sliced bread, but they’re not exactly unbiased.
You should probably start here. This is a very informative thread by @JohnT about the main aspects of Medicare. We’d need to know a lot more about your situation to give Advantage .vs. Supplement advice.
Feel free to ask questions in that other thread, @davidm.
Completely unscientific and un-researched, but my attitude is that if health insurance companies are spending all their advertising dollars on Medicare Advantage plans ad nauseum, those plans must be the most profitable to them, and hence very likely not the best deal for me.
Our advisor said “advantage” is a clever name, but there was no advantage to us. We got a “gap” plan that seems very good.
Yeah, I’ve pretty much decided to look at gap plans.
Screw William Shatner and Joe Namath. You can tell that someone’s career is pretty much over when they’re reduced to hawking Medicare Advantage plans.
Wise decision. If you lived in FL or CA, a Medicare Advantage may be good enough, but if not, the Supplement plan is the way to go.
I had a neighbor on a Medicare Advantage plan. He had heart problems and needed a stent. He waited and waited for prior approval (he finally got it). After that he switched to a supplement plan. With a supplement plan in the same situation he would have had the stent operation as soon as the cardiologist was ready to operate–no need for prior approval.
This is exactly what I tell my friends and family who are looking to either initially sign up or change plans. You notice that Humana (and Blue Cross, and everybody else) rarely, if ever, advertises their supplemental plans. Ergo, the Advantage plan is advantageous for the insurance company.
My sister’s SO sold Medicare plans for a time. I asked him the same question. His response was “If you are healthy, the Advantage plan is better. If you get sick, you’ll want a supplemental plan.”
Since I’m not real certain when I’ll get sick, I think I’ll just stick with my supplemental plan.
Well part of the advantage for insurance companies is cherry picking: they carefully target their ads to the healthier part of the population.
I’m not clear on how they might be doing that, at least with the TV commercials. They all feature reasonably healthy-looking seniors (or z-list senior celebrities) which is what I would expect to see in a medicare-related health care commercial. Is there more than that?
I don’t want to get into it, but this isn’t really true for Medicare which, as noted in the other thread, covers all Americans 65 and older who aren’t in the Tricare, VA, etc systems. There are caveats, like in everything, but this is generally true.
See for example:
‘There are profit differences between MA and MS plans’ is a different statement from ‘the commercials are aimed at healthier people.’
The examples you gave in a later post show that at the time of enrollment, the prospective clients are being cherry-picked.
As for the ads themselves, they appear to be targeted at anybody and everybody. Advertising zero-dollar premiums is certainly going to get the attention of all seniors, whether rich or poor.
I didn’t believe I would live long enough to as you for a link the “other thread”.
The one already referenced and linked to above, the one where I was identified as the OP.
That other thread.
Seemed pretty clear from context.
I went through all this recently (Medicare, Advantage vs Gap, etc.). After weeks compiling a 2" thick file folder, a Dummies book, and a large spreadsheet, I finally agreed to meet with an advisor from my former employer. They ran some sort of algorithm which spit out the same answer I’d settled on, but it took only a few minutes.
However, they kept quoting a much lower monthly price and I was confused. Finally the perky advisor said: “Are you subtracting the company subsidy from your cost?” I was gobsmacked. Apparently one of my retirement perqs is a monthly medigap subsidy which covers half the price, and it applies to me and my wife. I had no idea this existed. So I’m signed up months early for a nice gap plan that costs less than my insurance while employed. And I no longer need to fret about crawling back to a network Doc if I get sick on the road. Retirement just got a lot better.
They’d been peppering my mailbox with colorful cutesy ads encouraging me to call and let them help me, and I’d been ignoring them all this time like all the other ads. Maybe I shouldn’t be so quick to toss stuff into the recycle (the majority of crap in my mailbox is dropped directly into the bin on the way to the house). Makes me wonder what else I’ve missed.
Edited to add: Much thanks to JohnT, as I read and reread your thread on the subject
I had much the same experience, though in my case enlightenment came at the hands of a SHIP consultant (SHIP is discussed at some length in JohnT’s thread). I would most likely have gone with Medicare+Medigap anyway, but the subsidy sealed the deal.
You really need to compare all the options for Advantage vs Supplement as they pertain to your individual situation. For example, (according to a friend who just did some of these comparisons), with Advantage you have a network of doctors, with Medicare you can go to any doctor who accepts Medicare, a consideration if you summer/winter in different locations. The Advantage plans all claim to cover dental, vision, and hearing, but you need to check exactly what is covered in each area (which differs by plan, of course). Some Advantage plans cover only basic dental care, others cover only up $3000 of work. You need to calculate deductibles and copays for each plan. The comparisons are a big project, but worth doing because there are big dollar differences just between Supplemental plans and it’s probably the same for Advantage.