Where people stumble through the Medicare open enrollment period:
“From now until Dec. 7, America’s 65 million Medicare beneficiaries will be subject to the annual blizzard of marketing from health-insurance companies trying to get them to sign up to privatized Medicare Advantage, supplemental and Part D drug plans. Many — up to 30% — will be helped through the bewildering minefield by registered insurance brokers.
And yet there is no guarantee that your broker is being paid to give you the best possible advice and to get you into the best possible plan.
On the contrary, while the brokers are paid commissions by the health-insurance companies, they are not required to tell you how much commission they are getting to sell you a plan.
Even worse, different plans will pay them different commissions — meaning that they have an incentive to nudge you into the plan that pays them best, not necessarily the plan that makes the most sense for you.
Oh, and they don’t have to tell you about other available plans that they don’t happen to sell.
They also have no incentive to tell you that you are better off staying with traditional government-run Medicare. At best, they can then sell you two smaller add-on plans, Medicare D for drugs and Medigap supplemental insurance. Traditional Medicare pays no commissions.
“It’s not transparent,” Gretchen Jacobson, Medicare expert at the independent healthcare think tank the Commonwealth Fund, tells me. “Many brokers may be licensed to receive commissions from multiple insurers and multiple plans. However, most are not certified to sell all plans in their area. And the issue is that while they have to disclose to people if they don’t sell all the plans in the area, they don’t have to disclose how many they sell nor do they have to disclose how much they are paid to enroll them in Plan X versus Plan Y.”
[…] Commonwealth’s Jacobson recommends turning to your state’s State Health Insurance Assistance Program, known as SHIP. These are genuinely independent advisory bodies, funded by the federal government, who are there to help us navigate the minefield. (They can all be found online.)
