ReTiReD51 wrote:
Gail gave you the best advice in her first post.
Contact your state’s “State Health Insurance Assistance Program” SHIP
You can locate your state’s contact information at this link:
https://www.seniorsresourceguide.com/directories/National/SHIP/
The counsellors do not work for any insurance company so the information you receive from SHIP will be impartial.
I agree that if you do not understand "Medicare and You, 2018," possibly because you have never had any involvement in selecting healthcare insurance in your previous 65 years, that a SHIP volunteer is better than an insurance agent, who has an explicit bias. But whether or not SHIP volunteers are "impartial" depends on where you live. Where I live, Massachusetts, with a totally Democratic-Party-dominated state bureaucracy for 50 years, the SHIP program is totally biased against public Parts C and D of Medicare because the state bureaucrats believe -- incorrectly -- that Parts C and D are Republican-Party Medicare programs.
As a result for example, while on average in the United States more than one out of three people on Medicare are on public Part C of Medicare (and that includes people on Medicaid who do not need a supplmement at all so the meaningful percentage of people on Part C is higher), in Massachusetts Part C's market penetration is less than 20%:
- that's despite the fact that Massachusetts has one of the highest penetrations of HMOs and PPOs among people below Medicare age (almost all public Part C plans are HMOs and most of the rest are PPOs)
- that's despite the fact that public Part C plans in Massachusetts costs on average $1800 a year less than a combination of private Medigap insurance and a standalone Part D drug policy
- that's despite the fact that the Part C plans in Massachusetts almost all come from the same Massachusetts-based non-profit-charity sponsors that most of us have been using our entire working lives (we're not talking about the blood-sucking for-profit insurance companies you hear about in Democratic Party propaganda)
The problem is that Massachusetts SHIP volunteers get much of their training material from far left wing Democratic Party front groups such as the Center for Medicare Advocacy, the Medicare Rights Center, the National Something or Other for Social Security and Medicare, the National Coalition on the Aging, and others who apparently did not get the message that the national Democrats are no longer against public Part C of Medicare as they were until they lost the 2010 House election.
Depending on where you live, depend on pages 4-5 of "Medicare and You, 2018" before heading out to a SHIP volunteer unless you are sure they are not trained by the Democratic Party in your state.
Just to give you an example of how NOT "impartial" SHIP is in Massachusetts, I was a SHIP volunteer between 2011-2013 and was told to give out Obama campaign propaganda to seniors at the senior center. Again, I am not saying SHIP is like this in every state and I still prefer it to an insurance agent only because an agent has a conflict of interest in terms of what insurance brands he or she represents.
