Dear Banklady,
I received my Medicare card in the mail today but it won’t be effective until November (my birthday) but it arrived today…evidently, I have a choice to make. They give me the choice to take Medicare or not take it. Why would I not take it? It looks complicated but I fully intend to get my share. (Mandy, RI)
Mandy, Thanks for the email to Banklady.com.
YES, take the Medicare Part B unless you have a really good employer group health plan through your husbands or your CURRENT employment (if you have health insurance as a retiree from somewhere, they’ll expect you to take the Part B.) If you do have a retiree plan, contact them to see if they can convert your coverage to a Medigap policy that will take up some of the coverage slack but presumably cost less money.
If not, you’ll probably need to get coverage from a private insurer to cover some of what
Medicare doesn’t cover. And you’ll need to shop around for Medicare Part D, which is the prescription drug coverage (and which you should also sign up for unless you have good drug coverage through CURRENT employment through your or spouses. Medicare D is a nightmare and it came into effect in only the last year or so I was there and the training was not that adequate…basically, they told us to refer people to medicare.gov so the public could get a runaround from an understaffed, undertrained agency other than ours.
Medicare Part D is all through private insurance companies and which one you pick depends on their coverage of the medicines you take and hope and pray that they don’t change the coverage on those medicines. You also want to hope they pay well on medicines your doctor might prescribe in the future and mind you, with all that there’s a “doughnut hole” which is a period when they don’t cover squat which is supposed to encourage patients to take less medicine if they have to pay for it themselves…HAH!
Stop me if you’ve already been through this with your husband and have knowledge of it. If I can help you with any questions, I’ll try to help, but keep in mind that things change at SSA all the time. There are many sources on our site including medical bills help and loans for those who are in need for quick payments of bills or information to consolidate.
Good luck with retirement and better yet your health.
Tracy “The Banklady”