Only Fee-Only
This podcast interviews fee-only financial planners to learn about how they are helping their clients and serving their specific niches.
Only Fee-Only
#103 - Navigating Medicare Open Enrollment and Pre-65 Health Insurance with Cole Craven
Want to simplify health insurance? Tune in to the Only Fee Only podcast where we chat with Cole Craven from Move Health Partners. Cole breaks down pre-65 healthcare, health insurance, and Medicare open enrollment, offering practical tips for financial advisors and their clients.
Cole shares insights into key enrollment periods like Medicare Annual Enrollment and the Affordable Care Act marketplace, and why annual plan reviews are crucial to ensure clients have the right coverage.
Learn about Move Health, a platform that integrates healthcare planning seamlessly into advisory practices, making it easier to manage healthcare decisions. Plus, Cole highlights the importance of reviewing a retiree’s modified adjusted gross income for better planning.
https://movehealth.io/
Social:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/cole-craven/
Music in this episode was obtained from bensound.
Welcome back. This is the Only Fee Only podcast and we appreciate you being here. We're going to keep this introduction short and sweet because we have Cole Craven from Move Health Partners back on the show. It's going to be a really good episode because he's going to give you a lot of really relevant tips regarding pre-65 healthcare and health insurance and open enrollment for Medicare. This is the Only Fee Only podcast with Cole Craven.
Speaker 2:What's up everyone? Welcome to another episode of the Only Fee Only podcast. I'm Peter Travalo. I'm here with my co-host, brock Buckles. How's it going today, brock? It's great.
Speaker 1:Peter, we're out here living brother.
Speaker 2:Thriving. I love it.
Speaker 1:And today we have.
Speaker 2:Cole Craven on from Move Health, very excited to have him back on for a second time and dive deeper into the Move Health story. So, cole, welcome to the show man.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thanks for having me, Brock, I think you could answer your. How are you doing a little bit better? My favorite one that I've heard recently is I'm living the dream, just trying not to wake up. So that's one you can steal. I appreciate it when you're back, popcorn. I walked in today and into our office building and somebody asked me as soon as I hit the front door they said are you popping the corn today? And I was like I mean, I guess so. So like I live for those little Midwest one-liners. So if you have any good ones, let's share them.
Speaker 2:I love it. Gotta stay corny with the Indiana folk, and that is true. Cole is in Evansville and BC Brokerage we started in Indianapolis. So go Midwest, go Hoosiers.
Speaker 3:That's right.
Speaker 2:Absolutely love it. But, cole, before we get started and just start drilling you with some questions, what is Move Health?
Speaker 3:for those who do not know, yeah, so like the elevator pitch that I give is that we serve forward thinking financial advisors and their clients with expert health insurance and Medicare guidance, right.
Speaker 3:So like that's like the pitch, right, if you think about when I'm talking to an advisor about us that's never met us before. We help to solve the health insurance or the Medicare questions for clients. A lot of times advisors aren't equipped or they're under resourced in order to be able to answer those questions themselves. So we kind of act as an outsourced member of the team, not unlike you all, to help solve a unique insurance need. We come in and you guys probably use the quarterback reference. The advisor is the quarterback. We come in it's like maybe special teams or something to kick a field goal, win a game and get the get the client across the line. But we help people move from one phase of life to another with healthcare planning and like if you boiled all of it down, like I've been kicking around this idea of using like the phrase, just like damn good health insurance advice, uh.
Speaker 3:I don't think I need to do that, but but we'll pitch it here and see how it resonates with listeners of Only Fee Only, but it's so true. There's so much either bad advice that's out there when it comes to health insurance and Medicare or people make it way too complicated. Listen, we can get into the weeds on insurance, just like you guys can, but the reality of it is people don't want to be overwhelmed by insurance. They want to know that they're covered and they're taken care of, and so that's a problem we solve. Hopefully that's helpful. Peter, I didn't mean to go on for too long there.
Speaker 1:No, that's I mean. That's why they're talking to you, right? You shouldn't overcomplicate it. If you overcomplicate it, it feels intimidating, and then you get off the phone and they feel like they're exactly where they Yep.
Speaker 3:Our entire mission statement it's on our wall in our office is to make health coverage simple and clear. Just make it easy. There are complicated scenarios that we have to navigate often, but most of the time it's boiling it down to the lowest common denominator making certain to understand what it does, what it doesn't do and what you need it to do. That's a little bit about what we do at MoveHealth, for sure, right? So, um, yeah, I mean that's that's.
Speaker 2:That's a little bit about what we do at move health. For sure I love it. So let's dive a little bit into the business side of it. Um, you know what was your original marketing plan? Move health has been around for about a year now, right? Um, as far as marketing under it, you, of course, have been in the industry for longer than that. Um, but what was your initial marketing plan and kind of, how's that turned?
Speaker 3:and uh, plan and kind of how's that turned and morphed into what it is today. Yeah, I think that you know our entire business working with financial advisors and working with their clients is based upon, you know, shared trust, right? So you know, when an advisor refers a client to move health, it's an extension of them, right? If we totally screw it up, it doesn't look really bad on us. It does look really bad on us, but ultimately it looks bad on the relationship that that client has with their financial advisor. How dare you send me to that person, right?
Speaker 3:And so our initial marketing plan was just let's get our name out there and then, I think, on a go forward, our goal has always been to just give away as much good information as we can. There is so much like I mentioned, kind of like either bad advice or, you know, advice that's really clouded by personal bias or confirmation bias, and so we're trying to like really aggregate all of that information into something that's easy to understand and then just give people good, truthful advice. And it comes back to how we do business, which is just, you know, if you treat people the right way, you're kind, you're knowledgeable, the business side of things fall into, falls into place. And so we've been really fortunate with some of our you know thought leadership pieces that we've done, whether it be with some of our financial advisor partners or things that we've done ourselves. You know we've had an opportunity to meet with a lot of really incredible financial advisors who are bringing healthcare planning to the forefront of what they're doing, and so from this point forward, it's really like we're just we're riding the wave right.
Speaker 3:So you begin the groundswell, you kind of get some, you know, you get some infiltration into the market and then people go whoa, there really is nobody that's serving you know advisors with this particular tool or they're not doing it the way that I need it to be done. And so, from our perspective, you know, we're in a really fortunate spot to be able to grow pretty organically at this stage and have a lot of advisors that are coming to us out of necessity. Hey, I need a partner in this space. What do I need to do when?
Speaker 1:do I sign up.
Speaker 3:Where do I go so?
Speaker 1:I love that. I think you talk a lot about that in the first episode that we did kind of the inception of Mood, what you guys are doing. So for all that information, guys check out episode 90. That was a killer killer podcast. But for things that are relevant today, because I know we're coming up on open enrollment, we got a lot of things going on. I want to be timely, I want to make this episode impactful and people actually take a lot out of this in terms of talking to their clients.
Speaker 3:So lot out of this in terms of talking to their clients. So what is it that we need to know about? What's going on right now? Cole man, there's a lot to unpack, but I'll boil it down, like I've said. So a couple of things that are coming up. So I'll start with chronologically right. So coming up first is the Medicare annual enrollment period, aep. This is the time of year where Medicare beneficiaries, if they're already on Medicare, review their Part D coverage, so that's Part D for prescription drugs or they review their if they're on a Medicare Advantage plan. They review that during this time of year.
Speaker 3:The thing we've been saying as a team here at Move Health is if there was a time of year or if there was a year to review your Part D prescription drug coverage, it is this year, and the reason being there were some significant changes that have come to Part D prescription drug coverage as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act. So the Inflation Reduction Act you know, a couple years ago was passed as part of inflation reduction exactly what it sounds like, but overarching it was a COVID relief bill and part of that that was included within that was a CMS Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services ruling on prescription drug costs and they said back in 2021, they said, oh, in 2025, we're going to make all these big changes to prescription drug costs, and it's kind of snuck up on us, right. We're to 2025 now, believe it or not, and so there's a big change that's coming this year. You can read the CMS release on it, released July 29th of this year that they are limiting out-of-pocket expenses on prescription drugs to $2,000. It's awesome, right. This is incredible. It's a big deal for people that are on really expensive medications. Now, some of the things that we think that are going to take place and this is all getting back to the timeliness of all this some of the things that we think are going to take place is that you know, essentially, as a part of that Inflation Reduction Act, with the change to prescription drug costs, you know, limiting them at $2,000, they're forcing the insurance carrier to participate more in the cost of these prescription drugs, and so you can imagine what happens when you ask an insurance carrier to pay out more. Well, the rates go up, right. So we're expecting we don't know for certain. We'll find out actually tomorrow when we can see plans that are available on October 1st this is September 30th. We're recording this. We can see the plans tomorrow to be able to say, okay, this is how much the increase is. But anytime that you expect an insurance carrier to pay out more, they're going to recoup some of those losses somehow and they're going to do it through raising premiums. So we do expect prescription drug plans, or PDPs, those premiums to increase.
Speaker 3:That Medicare annual enrollment period runs from October 15th through December the 7th, right. So it's not like life insurance or home and auto where you can switch at any time of year. This is the time of year to do it. October 15th through December 7th is the Medicare annual enrollment period. And so what that looks like for us at Move Health is we're helping people to review that drug coverage. We're helping people to review their plans. Many times it's us saying, hey, you're good, right where you're at right If we put them somewhere last year. Many times that's you're in the right spot, you don't need to make a change. But with some of these upcoming changes to prescription drug costs, we're looking at that much more closely and everybody's looking at it much more closely. So if there were a time of year to review your Medicare prescription drug coverage, if there was a year to do it, it is 2024, looking for 2025 coverage.
Speaker 3:So hopefully that's helpful and then I can walk into the pre 65 side of things. But I'll stop there on Medicare because you know, brock, peter, you know I don't, I don't know exactly how old you guys are, but, um, you know, we're getting to a stage where our parents are starting to get close to that 65 number and um, and so there's a lot of times where they're they're asking, they're asking us or they're 65. Last year and he was like I spent 17 hours, he goes. I marked East, but I spent 17 hours trying to figure out what the right Medicare supplement, what the right Medicare prescription drug plan was for me. He goes and I still think I got it wrong, and so you know it's like a, it's a massive need.
Speaker 3:But all that to be said, if we got anything out of this podcast, october 15th through December 7th review your prescription drug coverage. Encourage your clients to review their prescription drug coverage. Big changes this year and especially if you know that they're taking a high dollar prescription medication, they've got a lot of costs with that. This is going to make a big change for them this year. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Good point. There, man Go ahead Pete.
Speaker 2:Good points for sure, yeah, so how about moving into the 365? Yep.
Speaker 3:So pre 65 also has its own enrollment period or window, which is, um. In most States it starts on November 1st and runs through December 15th. For January 1st effective dates, right? Um, if you go past December 15th and in federally facilitated marketplaces it's going to go from, uh, the whole, the whole window is November 1st through Jan 15. But to get a January 1st start date you need to input your application before December 15th. And so important dates there.
Speaker 3:This is the time of year if you are on the Affordable Care Act marketplace. So if you're an early retiree, a small business owner, you want to review if you should make a shift from a different type of coverage to the Affordable Care Act marketplace. This is the time of year to do it. And you always wonder, like, well, why can't I, you know, why can't I get health insurance? Just any time of year we can with a special enrollment period, right? So if you have lost a job or lost coverage or you have, you know, had a baby, or you've moved or things along those lines, those open up special enrollment periods. But the way that I usually think about it is you know, you guys do the PNC side of things and so you know you don't get into a car accident and then, and then go get auto insurance right after you got in the accident, right, why? Because insurance carriers couldn't keep up with that demand, right, they couldn't keep up with those loss ratios. And so same goes for health insurance.
Speaker 3:You make a change during a particular time of year, and that happens during the open enrollment period for the Affordable Care Act marketplace, and so, if you are on a marketplace plan Obamacare, trumpcare, bidencare, whatever you want to call it if you are on the marketplace, november 1st through December 15th is that first window where you really want to make certain that you're reviewing that. The way that we position at MoveHealth is your plan might stay identical. Right, it might stay identical year to year. Great, has anything changed with you? No, stay where you're at Perfect.
Speaker 3:You need to review that, though, because the flip side of that is your plan might not stay the same. They are required to move you to a plan that is substantially equivalent, but it doesn't. You know insurance cards. If you're with Ambetter, you might get insurance cards from Anthem in the spring that says, hey, this was the closest match to what you had, and your doctors aren't in network, things have changed etc. Etc. So always best to review that every single year. If you're working with a good broker, it doesn't cost anything to do that review, you know, and it's important because it can be something where your plan has changed or something has changed with your health coverage, you've added a new doctor to the mix. Whatever it might be important always to review that during the open enrollment period. So Medicare AEP October 15th through December 7th. Health insurance marketplace open enrollment period November 1st through December 15th. It extends through January 15th this year as well.
Speaker 1:Golden nuggets for days. I love it, man. So obviously we work with financial planners. That's who listens to this predominantly? If you're only financial planners, you guys work with a lot of financial planners. What are some of the questions that you know that they're getting about this stuff right now and I think you just addressed it very well, but is there anything that you didn't touch on regarding questions that they're getting or misconceptions that maybe are out there that they might be hearing from their clients? To give them that one quick hit or answer before they introduce you, before they introduce their clients to the good people at MoveHealth?
Speaker 3:Yeah for sure. It's a really good question. Keep me on my toes. So what I would say?
Speaker 3:A couple of misconceptions that are out there, a couple of things that you can do to prepare your clients well, right. So if you've got a client that is in a distribution phase and they're in retirement and they're taking out of accounts now, rather than inputting into something that you can help them to do is to establish what their modified adjusted gross income is. There aren't a lot of financial planners that understand that modified adjusted gross income is directly correlated to what your clients pay for health insurance if they're getting it through the marketplace directly correlated. And so modified adjusted gross income goes into how many of the advanced premium tax credits or subsidies you receive on the marketplace. And so critically important for your clients to have their modified adjusted gross income right, whether they're DIYing their coverage to the marketplace, they're working with us at Move Health, whatever it might be. That's something we've got to know and an advisor usually has a really good line of sight into, because you know your modified adjusted gross income can actually be different than your total income. So we see it all the time where a retiree client says I'm going to retire on $120,000 a year, but their modified adjusted gross income is actually only $75,000 a year, and so they could arrive at two very different health insurance costs if they plugged in either of those you know incomes into their marketplace application. So I think that's an important one arm your clients with that information what their income is going to be for the next year. You know we work with a lot of really great advisors that are proactively doing this. Hey, here's what your income is going to be, here's the move health team, here's how you plug in, etc. Etc. So making that process really easy for them, but making certain you arm your clients with that information, because they could be either overpaying or underpaying for their health insurance for the year if they get it through the marketplace. So I would say that's a key piece. I think another one is same thing. Same thing goes for your small business owners. Your business owners, your entrepreneurs, people that are buying health coverage on their own. They need to know you know how to effectively estimate what their health or, excuse me, how to effectively estimate what their modified adjusted gross income is. So I think that's an important piece.
Speaker 3:A couple of other things that I would say is like kind of things I've heard from from advisors that newly on board to move, or, you know, from clients, is well, I, I got, I took care of my health insurance. It's done, right, it's done. I took care of it last year, like, well, no, it's something. It's something you need to review every single year, right? So same goes for what you guys talk about on the home and auto side of things. You know, it's not.
Speaker 3:It is different than a life insurance policy in the sense that you need to revisit that every single year. Um, have you? You guys know the questions to ask, but from our perspective, when we're talking with a client, you know what's changed, right? And, and you know, are you seeing a new doctor? Have you moved? Have you, um, you know, had significant changes to your income? Have you added someone to the family? Has your one child turned 26 and aged off? Have they gotten their own coverage? We don't need to double cover them on your plan. We can reduce costs that way, right? So, um, I would say that another kind of misconception that we hear, uh, is is that you know I need to. I don't need to review my coverage. I'm not, you know, I, I'm good, it worked fine this past year. Um, there are very few health insurance options that you don't need to view a review every every year, so all great points, what are some other main value ads that your clients and advisors like, really appreciate from you?
Speaker 2:Like you know, advisors listening to this. Why should they move, work with move health? What's the difference and like what are the pillars that they're getting?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's a really good question and it goes back to kind of the problem that we set out to solve. So you know, I kind of I told the story of my in-laws the last time that we were together on the podcast. They were 60 years old. Their advisor told them they were a big box broker. Their advisor told them, you know, plan for $28,000 a year. And my, my father-in-law said I guess I can't retire, right? And so you know, all of that to be said, we ended up working an income strategy with them, alongside their advisor. They they don't pay $28,000 a year for their health insurance. Um, you know, there's, there's strategies around that. And so I think that you know that's one piece you get to. You get a collaborative team member with with move health. You know we work alongside our advisor partners, not just a, it's not just a pass off and uh, you know we handle it from there. We do, but we're always including the advisor.
Speaker 3:And then I think another piece that's important to note is that when we set out to start Move Health, we recognized that there was a gap right, and we recognized that the gap there were healthcare planning technologies that'll say, hey, here's, they may even arrive at a specific plan and but at the end of it it says go talk to a licensed agent to enroll in this plan. And we over here have had years and years and years of experience in the brokerage agency space and we said we can figure out how to build a healthcare planning software. And so we did so. We built a healthcare planning software that allows advisors to accurately estimate healthcare costs. There's a referral dashboard in there that allows an advisor to track their client through each step of our process. It's beginning to sound like a move health infomercial not the not, but all of it. To be said, we are really filling a need that no one else is in the space right now, which is helping advisors to have a really clear partner in the space that is taking your client truly from end to end right. So we're going all the way from. You've initiated the conversation using the healthcare planning software that we've built. You've referred them through our platform and now we're walking them through with a high touch kind of white glove experience to get that client all the way from.
Speaker 3:Hey, I have questions to. I feel really confident moving forward into my next phase of life. So I think if I had to rope it all together. It's that we are tech enabled but we're still very much human driven, like you know, just not unlike you guys. You guys are using all the newest stuff to make certain that you're efficient and that your clients have a really good understanding of what's to come and what's next.
Speaker 3:Um, but at the same point, everybody in the insurance space uh, you know, they still want someone, just like financial planners. They still want someone to put a seal of approval on it and go you're doing the right thing, you're making the right moves, you're in a good spot. This is how it works, this is how it doesn't work. And then they know they've got a person on the go forward that they can revert back to and ask questions. And we continue to support our advisor partners long-term with the clients that we have worked with as well as new clients that come through and have a need. So we help people to add an edge to their firm. That's what we do.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that man and I don't think it sounds like an infomercial at all. I think it sounds like you have pride in what you do and you believe in what you guys are doing, and I think that's good, because you're putting it out there, you're laying it on the table and people understand what the value prop and what it is from the get-go. There's no guessing, it's not secretive like a lot of the insurance industry gets a bad rap for, so I think that's really cool. But where can people reach out and find you, man? One of the goals of these new episodes is to keep the fluff out of it and just keep it action packed, and I think you've done a great job of that. But I do want to make sure people can get in contact with you. So how can they reach you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so when we started a healthcare planning technology, we decided to make a shift. So our website we've now got a tech website, right so it's movehealthio. So it's really really easy, super short, movehealthio. You can, uh you can find everything you'd want to there, uh, all the information about who we are, what we do, how we do it, and you know.
Speaker 3:Getting back to my, my thought process, I'm just like it's damn good insurance advice, right, like that's. That's what we want to do. That's we want to make it really simple for an advisor to plug non-investment value into their practice, right, because if you're tying your success to investment performance, you're going to have really incredible runs and you're going to have times where it's awful, um, and then the, the. The reverse of that as well is, um, adding non-investment value, but also helping something you know, helping your clients with something that they're already going to have to figure out on their own right. You can either help them with it or you, or you don't, um, and so I think those are. Those are the things.
Speaker 3:So movehealthio, super simple to uh, if you're an advisor listening to this to, to book an advisor discovery, call um and just sit down and get to know us get to know our team. Um, everybody gets a dedicated person, every advisor gets a dedicated person they work with on our team. And so you know, we try to make it really really easy super low lift, super high impact to plug us in, not unlike the guys at BC Brokerage that you know make it easy to plug in, super, super simple to work with. You know, we don't want to complicate your life, we want to make it easier and take stuff off your plate.
Speaker 2:Awesome, cole, thank you so much for your time Of course.
Speaker 3:Glad to be here. Thanks, fellas, for having me again.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you bet, buddy, it won't be the last. All right, take it easy.