Part A and Part B Enrollment

Who should enroll? Almost all of you should enroll into part A hospital coverage. Almost everyone in here. The only reason we believe you should not enroll into part A is if you are contributing to a health savings account, an HSA. If you have a high deductible health insurance plan through your employer, oftentimes they will have an HSA option.

And so you wouldn’t want to take part A if you’re going to continue working and keep that plan. There can be some tax implications there and some sort of penalty or you lose the tax credit. Long story short, if you’re not contributing to an HSA, enroll into part A.

It can only help you. It can’t hurt you even if you’re keeping your employer coverage. Okay, who should enroll into part B of Medicare? Your doctor’s office portion. If you have access to creditable coverage like employer coverage and the government or Medicare deems coverage creditable, if you have more than 20 employees at your employer. If you have a small group plan, if you’re the owner of a company and you just got a small group plan of like 3 or 4 employees, that would not be creditable.

So you would likely need to move to Medicare and enroll in part B, because if you didn’t, you could be penalized for not taking part B. It really boils down to whether you or your spouse have access to creditable coverage, which is oftentimes employer coverage? If you have access to employer coverage, you can delay part B and say, “no thank you. I’m not going to take it right now. I’m going to wait.”

You can keep going without penalty. But if you do not have access to that type of coverage, then you do need to take part B or you could be penalized. When should you enroll? Typically, three months prior to your birthday month. If you were born in December, you would want to start the application process to enroll into Medicare September 1^st. So just to give you a heads up, if you were born in December, say December 14th, your Medicare will start on the first day of your birthday month. So in that scenario, it would start on December 1st.

It doesn’t start on your birthday like a lot of people think. It starts the first day of your birthday month, so that’s when you should enroll about three months prior to your birthday month. Now, how should you enroll? If you’re drawing Social Security, then it’s very simple. You will automatically be enrolled into Medicare. They will send you your Medicare card about three months prior.

Nothing you need to do except for when you get that card. You call us. Call someone, a brokerage. We would prefer us, but you need to start shopping those plans. And so that would be a good time to do it. If you are not drawing Social Security, then you definitely need to apply yourself. And it is pretty shocking to me that the government does not send out anything saying, “Hey, you got to do this or you’re going to be penalized,” but it is the case.

So you need to actually take action yourself and you want to do that three months prior. How do you do that? You need to do it through the Social Security office, Social Security Administration. You can do it online SSA.gov. You can do it in person. I wouldn’t recommend that. But you definitely have to apply yourself for part A and part B, and we are happy to help with that process as well.

A few things that are not covered by Medicare, dental, vision and hearing benefits are not covered. Gym memberships. Prescription drug coverage. Long term care insurance. So these are all things that you have to get on your own, whether it be through a Medicare Advantage plan that covers a lot of these, or getting a standalone plan for some of these.

And we’ll dive more here in a second. Long-term care is something that a lot of folks kind of forget about, and it’s something that you want to look at before it’s too late for sure. And we have a few partners we could refer you to that can help with that.