TRICARE For Life. Thank you for your service. Here is what you need with it, what you do not, the one bill you still pay, and the two places the paperwork comes back.
Medicare & Healthcare

TRICARE For Life. Thank you for your service. Here is what you need with it, what you do not, the one bill you still pay, and the two places the paperwork comes back.

Military retirees get coverage with no enrollment and no premium of its own, and it pays what Medicare leaves behind. In return for a career, that is right. But it rides on Part B, and Part B is the bill. The four ways a claim pays, why you do not need a drug plan, what happens if you join an Advant

Three nights in a hospital bed that did not count. Observation versus inpatient, the notice they have to hand you, and the three-day rule that decides whether Medicare pays for rehab.
Medicare & Healthcare

Three nights in a hospital bed that did not count. Observation versus inpatient, the notice they have to hand you, and the three-day rule that decides whether Medicare pays for rehab.

You can sleep three nights in a hospital, in a gown, with a wristband, and be an outpatient the whole time. Then the rehab bill arrives. Here is the rule that makes that possible, the form the hospital must give you, the one question to ask while you are still in the bed, and the arithmetic: the sam

Same pill, same plan, different counter. Why one prescription costs more at the pharmacy across the street, what preferred actually means, and the thing your pharmacist is allowed to tell you.
Medicare & Healthcare

Same pill, same plan, different counter. Why one prescription costs more at the pharmacy across the street, what preferred actually means, and the thing your pharmacist is allowed to tell you.

Medicare's own words: preferred pharmacies may save you money because they have agreed to charge less than other pharmacies in your plan's network. Same drug, same plan, two prices. Here is the arithmetic on three prescriptions at two counters, when mail order wins and when it does not, the cash-pri

Medicare's enrollment periods, defined with sources. Initial, General, Special, and the two different windows both called Open Enrollment, plus a short path to the one that is actually yours.
Medicare & Healthcare

Medicare's enrollment periods, defined with sources. Initial, General, Special, and the two different windows both called Open Enrollment, plus a short path to the one that is actually yours.

Medicare's website calls the fall window Open Enrollment. The regulation calls it the annual coordinated election period. The industry calls it AEP. January has an Open Enrollment of its own, and the Marketplace has another. Here is every period, its dates, who it is for, when coverage starts, and w

The Annual Notice of Change, read like a spec sheet. The seven lines that matter, the two meters people confuse, and what your plan can change mid-year without asking.
Medicare & Healthcare

The Annual Notice of Change, read like a spec sheet. The seven lines that matter, the two meters people confuse, and what your plan can change mid-year without asking.

Every Advantage and drug plan follows the same government template for this letter, so I pulled the template. Here is the layout, the summary table on page two, the arithmetic for a made-up plan whose premium did not move but whose costs did, and the mid-year changes the rules allow. Deadline for th

Two letters are in the mail. One says your plan is changing for 2027. The other says your plan is going away. How to tell them apart, what happens if you do nothing, and where to bring your questions.
Medicare & Healthcare

Two letters are in the mail. One says your plan is changing for 2027. The other says your plan is going away. How to tell them apart, what happens if you do nothing, and where to bring your questions.

Two different letters are landing this month. One says your plan is changing. The other says your plan is going away. They carry different deadlines and different rights, and the most expensive mistake is treating the second one like the first. Plus the one door that only opens if you go to Original