Medicare enrollment opens Thursday

22 minutes after 6 a.m. An important date is coming up this Thursday. That is when Medicare enrollment opens up. So to talk more about this, we are joined now by financial advisor Jason Matthews. Jason, thank you so much for joining us this morning. Thank you for having me this morning. I know it's a federal holiday, but you know, you like to keep working as well. Exactly. All right. So we have that important date coming up, October 15th. That is to enroll into Medicare or make sure you have updates to your plan, right? Correct. Absolutely. So October 15th is the opening of Medicare and then it ends on December 7th. All right, so you have to get everything done right now. So right now, a lot of people look to, hey, I want to pay the lowest cost premiums. What do you say to that? Before you just say, hey, I just want to pay the lowest cost premiums, you really want to see what your plan is, right? You want to make sure that it covers your prescriptions and it covers your doctors, especially this year where you see a lot of providers might close their network or don't cover certain prescriptions. So before you automatically just say no, it in the long term might cost you more if they don't actually have your prescriptions or your doctor that you're currently using. So you might not, so the lower tier of that may bump you out, that way it'll end up costing you more anyway out of your own pocket. Exactly, right? So if you have that prescription you take all the time, it no longer is provided by your plan, now you're going to have to pay out of pocket. It's going to be way more expensive, and you're going to have to come out of pocket, because now you might be out of network as well for your primary physician, or you have to switch physicians. So yes, it definitely has huge impact. All right, now Medicare, with Medicare, it's $2,100 for Part D prescription cap. It's now in place right now. How does the Medicare prescription payment plan help seniors spread out the high cost of drugs into a predictable kind of monthly payment type of situation? So the great benefit of that is this. If you're on your plan and there are prescriptions in your plan, so you want to make sure you have that, over those 12 months, whenever you renew, up until that $2,100, you know that's going to be the cap that you're going to be paying for your prescriptions that's in your network. The $2,100 cap. $2,100. So that's a huge benefit for a lot of seniors who's over the age of 65. That's why it's very important for them not just to get their Part A and Part B, but consider getting a Part Plan D or part of that plan that covers those prescription costs. I mean, that's if you can afford it, though, because adding that on, how much does it cost to add the extra part onto it? Great question. So it really just depends on your income and your income brackets. So what they do is they look at what was your income two years prior to you, And that determines what is going to be your income that you're going to be paying towards your Medicare Part B and also your Part D. All right, that's something important to look for. If a doctor or favorite pharmacy drops out of the network, what's the fastest way for folks to figure out whether switching to the original Medicare or choosing a different Medicare Advantage plan will save money? Go to Medicare.gov, and at that point, you can actually do a comparison on what plans covers your doctor and your prescriptions that you're currently taking. That will help you out tremendously. So these tools that are available on the site can kind of guide you through it because this is not the easiest thing to figure out. It never is even, you know, the ones that we have here at work. It's never the easiest thing to figure out. And then when you factor in the federal government part of things, it's not easy there either. But they have made it easy for you to kind of put in what you need and what your wants are. Correct. And it will kind of tailor things to you. Exactly. So you're like, oh, this is my doctor. Here's my prescriptions. It would say, based off that, here's all the Medicare D plans that you could do that you're eligible for. All right. So any final words that you want to get across to folks as this deadline? Well, this is the start of it coming up on the 15th, right? Correct. Yeah. So what I would say is don't just jump the gun. Make sure you're making an educated decision about this. If you're over a certain income bracket for it, look at your income if you had a life-changing event. If you did, there's ways that you can get back and lower your premiums by filling out a certain tax form that could push you back down to have cheaper premiums if you had a life-changing event from where you were two years ago. What's a life-changing event? Let's say divorce, or I just retired, or I sold my house that year, or I sold some stocks. If it's a one-time event, the government will allow you to reduce that so you can have a little cheaper premiums compared to normal. Wow. Is that something you help with as well? Definitely. Wow. All right. And October 15th is also the tax deadline date. Exactly. So file your taxes. File your taxes as well, yeah. You've got a couple things happening here in October. A whole lot is happening. Jason Matthews, you're going to be busy here for the next few weeks. We appreciate your time and stopping by today. We did.