Another installment in our special series on
Medicare's annual open enrollment period.
Updated October
4, 2019
Philip Moeller - Author, Get What's
Yours books on Social Security. Medicare, and, upcoming, Health Care; blogger
for PBS NewsHour; founder http://Insure.com .
Many thanks today to
Will, a reader who has many of the same questions I did when I took a look at
the new Medicare Plan Finder. Unless you use an insurance broker or advisor to
help you choose your Medicare coverage for next year, you must use Plan Finder
to get the details you need on next year’s plans.
In late August,
Medicare released a new Plan Finder. While I support the goals of the changes,
I’m afraid this “new and improved” tool is going to create a lot of new and
improved confusion during this year’s open enrollment period!
Will agrees. “Have
you taken a gander at the ‘new’ iteration of Medicare.gov?” he writes. “It’s
bad, in my opinion.” Among the problems he cites, and which I confirmed in my
own review, is that people can no longer access their list of prescribed
medications in the new Plan Finder.
Instead, they will
need to enter their drugs and re-enter them every time they want to see which
Part D drug plans cover their medications and what they charge for them. This
can cause enough of a headache to require an additional prescription for a new
pain medication!
There is a
work-around, but some people may not like it or may be confused by it. If you
open a My Medicare account, you can enter your drugs there and only need to do
it one time. When you then open up Plan Finder, your My Medicare information
should automatically populate the proper fields in the new tool and help you
make the needed plan comparisons for 2020 coverage. This is a big improvement.
Help is on the way
Will also found that
the new tool is not as helpful as the old one in allowing him to evaluate Part
D plans. “I haven’t found any way to compare two or three drug plans. The old
website allowed me to compare up to three plans, side by side.” Others have faulted
this shortcoming as well. A Medicare spokesman said additional changes will be
made to Plan Finder before Oct. 15.
A Medicare spokesman said additional changes will be
made to Plan Finder before Oct. 15.
He said these changes
would include addressing perhaps the new tool’s biggest shortcoming — it does
not provide total out-of-pocket cost estimates for different plans. This is a
big problem, and it drove Will to distraction.
“The problem is that
there’s no way to get a real estimate of one’s total year’s costs, including
monthly premiums and drug costs. Thus, I’ve had to print out seven
highly-compressed pages of more than 30 possible drug plans, then separately
total the yearly cost for the premiums for each of the plans, and then add each
of those totals to the new website’s estimates of my yearly drug costs for each
of them! Then, and only then, might I have a reasonable idea of my total yearly
cost for any particular plan.”
Will has my
sympathies and so will you if this flaw is not fixed.
Other issues
Separately, another
reader sent me a screen shot of clearly incorrect information in Plan Finder
for a Medigap supplement plan. I told Medicare about it, and am waiting for
confirmation that the error has been corrected.
Given these problems,
I strongly urge Medicare beneficiaries to hold off making 2020 plan enrollments
until the beginning or even middle of November. Your choices for 2020 plans
will still be effective next Jan. 1. And waiting to decide will give Medicare
more time to get it’s act together.
Thanks to Will and
other readers for paying attention!
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