When you start Medicare, how much extra insurance do you need?
More is not necessarily better.
Confused about your Medicare coverage options? Watch our free video: How to Find the Best Medicare Coverage Without Paying More Than You Need To…
Are you worried that you were maybe talked into buying more policies or paying more than you really need to when you started on Medicare?
If so, send a message, and we can set up a free, no obligation Medicare plan consultation to go through the plans that you have and evaluate them and see if you have too little coverage, too much coverage, or the right amount of coverage.
How much insurance do you need?
Often, probably at least once a week, I get a call from someone who feels that they might be paying more than they need to.
Usually, the story is that when they were getting close to their 65th birthday and starting Medicare, an insurance agent called them out of the blue, cold called them from a list, and ended up selling them a whole bunch of policies that they were convinced they needed to buy to be safe.
The reasoning that’s usually given in sales pitches is that Medicare doesn’t cover everything, and that is absolutely true. Medicare was never designed to cover all of your health costs. However, even though that’s the case, you don’t necessarily need to purchase every policy that’s being offered to you in order to get all of your medical costs safely covered.
Case Study
I’m going to give you an example of a woman who called me recently. She’s been on Medicare for about 18 months, and it was the same story that I hear often.
An agent had called her and convinced her that she needed a Medicare Supplement Plan F, and she needed a zero dollar deductible Part D plan, and she needed a dental-vision-hearing plan, and then she also needed a cancer plan.
After about 18 months all of these premiums, which were pretty expensive to start with, have gone up and, especially the Plan F has really gone up in price, so she called me to find out if this is actually what she needs in her situation.
How We Can Help
And this is what we do at Benefit Consultants-Midwest. We aren’t here to sell policies. We are not tied to any one insurance company. We don’t have any quotas. So what that means is that we are free to work for our clients.
We don’t necessarily push any one company over another. We contract with the companies that are competitive in the areas where we are licensed, and that means that we can shop around for our clients and find them policies that actually meet their needs.
We have no reason to push one company over another to any particular person. We have no reason to push one policy over another to any particular person. Because we can work for our clients and find them products that actually meet their needs, Benefit Consultants-Midwest has been growing through client loyalty since 1976.
So in this case, when this woman called me, I needed some more information about her and her life to be able to determine what policies would be a good fit.
Medicare Part D Plan
The Part D plan: there’s nothing we could do about that at the moment. Part D plans can only be changed October 15th through December 7th, so we put that one on the back burner. She’s on my calendar for October. We’ll look at it then.
Medicare Supplement Plan F
I’m going to link to another video explaining why Plan F is probably not a great idea for anyone anymore, but to keep this short, she doesn’t go to the doctor very often. This is the most comprehensive plan for Medicare Supplements available. If you don’t go to the doctor very often, you probably don’t need this, so instead, we found her a Plan N, which has a much lower premium cost.
The benefits are slightly different, but she didn’t lose that much in benefits, and it’s so much more affordable, (much, much more affordable) than what she was paying before.
We had a coverage decision (once you’re past your first six months on Medicare Part B you do have to answer health questions, which she did and provided a medication list) that she was accepted in less than 24 hours.
Most people are able to get through underwriting if you want to change your Medicare Supplement. I have another video or two that explain that more than what I will go into detail here today.
Dental-Vision-Hearing
In this case, this client sees a dentist whom she absolutely adores. She’s been going to this dentist for decades and doesn’t want to change dentists.
Her dentist though, is not part of any networks, so what that means is this dental-vision-hearing plan that she’s paying for is only giving her the much lower out-of-network dental benefits, so combining that with the fairly low vision and hearing benefits that she was getting, it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to keep paying the monthly premium for that dental-vision-hearing policy.
So what we came up with in this situation is she’s going to talk to her dentist and see if he would work out some kind of a discount plan for cash payments, and then for vision and hearing, there’s a discount program that goes along with the Medicare Supplement that will help out with the vision, and then we found another hearing discount program, and she doesn’t have hearing aids, so it’s it’s not that big a deal for this particular client. For someone else, it might be different.
Cancer Policy
Medicare covers cancer. If you’re diagnosed with cancer, Medicare and your Supplement will cover it. If you really feel that you financially need an extra cancer policy, I strongly recommend to anyone looking for one that they read really, really carefully through everything. There are too many specific illness policies that make it difficult to get a payout from the company, so generally, I don’t recommend those. Make sure that you know what you are purchasing before you purchase it.
In this case, she’s going to think about it. That one may end up getting getting dropped. We’ll see.
A lot of this is whatever the client is comfortable with, whatever the client feels safe with, but I also go through the math with everyone, and dental coverage is a big one for math.
Dental Insurance Math
Dental policies generally have an annual max that the policy will pay toward your dental care, and that tends to be around a thousand dollars, fifteen hundred dollars, or if you have a more expensive dental plan, it might be two thousand dollars. What that means is the insurance company is not going to pay out more than whatever that limit is.
If your limit is a thousand dollars, you’re not going to get paid out more than a thousand dollars in benefits, even if your dental expenses are more than a thousand dollars in the year. The rest of it is your responsibility.
So if you’re paying fifty dollars a month for a dental policy that only pays out a thousand dollars, unless you are getting more than $600 worth of dental services in the year, it might not be worth it to keep that policy. Again it’s whatever the the client is comfortable with, but my role is to make sure that you understand exactly what you’re buying before you purchase it.
Rate Increases and Plan Changes
We’re also here whenever there’s a rate increase, whenever plans change, which they can every year, to explain to you what those changes mean for you, and then we can go through, if you’d like, and compare plans again. And if your current plan is no longer something you’re comfortable with, we can look for something else.
No Need to Overpay
What we came up with in this case is going to end up saving a lot of monthly premium, and that’s the pattern. People who have been convinced to buy more than they need come in, and we redo the plans so that the premium cost per month is much more reasonable, but the client is still adequately covered for medical and other expenses.
So again, if you are worried that you are carrying policies you don’t really need, or if you’re worried that you’re just paying too much…if you’ve had years and years of rate increases and you’ve never looked at the possibility of switching to another plan, then send a message or watch our free online video to learn how to find the best Medicare coverage for you. We are happy to schedule free, no obligation consultations to look at the plans you have and compare them to what else is available in your area.
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