The leaves aren’t the only things changing this time of year! A lot of things are available to change for only a short period of time, but is your Medicare Supplement or Medigap Plan restricted to that Annual Election Period from October 15th to December 7th? Find out this week on 65 and Counting!
Welcome back, everyone! I’m getting a whole lot of questions coming in on the phone about what people can and can’t do during this time of year! The long story short is, you can pretty much change anything you want with your Medicare and the plans you use with it. We covered that during last week's episode!
What we didn’t cover in detail was what can you do with your Medicare Supplement plan? I’ll start off by saying this: AEP or the Annual Election Period from October 15th to December 7th is a time period in which Medicare allows you to make changes to your Prescription Drug Plan and your Medicare Advantage Plan! You may have noticed I left Medigap or Medicare Supplement out of that statement. Yes, you heard me correctly. The reason I left out Medicare Supplement plans is you can change those any time of the year! You’re not restricted to the Annual Enrollment Period.
There’s a caveat to that. You can change your Medigap plan to another Medigap plan, no matter the time of year as long as… you can pass those medical underwriting questions, and are determined eligible by the insurance company you want to change to. I also want to note that if you’re in your first year of being on Medicare and you chose a medicare advantage plan, you can change over to a medicare supplement plan without any underwriting, but it HAS to be in your first twelve months, this is known as the medicare advantage trial period.
What if you’re on a Medicare Supplement now, but you want to change to a medicare advantage plan? Well, then the Annual Election Period is the time to do it! Yes, that’s the AEP we’ve been talking about on the show the last few weeks! This time period will allow you to disenroll from your Medicare Supplement and Prescription Drug plan and transfer your medicare benefits over to a private insurance carrier for an all-in-one medicare advantage plan and you won’t have to worry about any pesky underwriting questions! The caveat to that is if you ever do want to go back on to a medicare supplement plan, you’ll have to pass the underwriting and be accepted!
So, the message I want to get across is, the hard-working Certified Medicare Planners at American Retirement Advisors and The Medicare Architects put a whole lot of focus on Medicare Advantage Plans and Prescription Drug Plan research and reviews this time of year! Because there’s such a small window to do it, as opposed to Medicare Supplement research which can be done any time of year! That doesn’t mean we won’t take a look at yours for you now, just let us know!
Certified Medicare Planners are standing by to answer any questions you may have about the Annual Election Period and what you can do right now. Just give us a call! I’ll include our phone number and my email address in the description of the episode!
I hope you have a much better understanding of everything we talked about this week! Don’t forget to give our video a little thumbs up and follow our page so you get notified when new episodes come out, share with all your friends, and most importantly have a great week!