Attention Retirees: Stay on Top of Your Health Insurance With This Helpful Online Tool
Life is complicated and hard to manage. And what younger people don’t realize is that it doesn’t just all stop once you retire. As long as you’ve got goals and dreams, you’ve got schedules and things to keep track of—especially when it comes to Medicare.
This is why the Medicare program set up a site to help you say on top of all things health insurance. It’s called mymedicare.gov. We recommend it to our clients, and now we are recommending it to you.
Among other things, this site has some wonderful, time saving features including:
A Claim Library
Right on the home page, the site shows your most recent claims all the way back to claims made 36 months ago. In a three-column chart, the site displays
- What you were charged
- What Medicare approved and paid for
- What you might be billed (not considering your Medicare Supplement)
This is particularly helpful when budgeting for health care costs. If you know you’ve got a health care bill on the way, you can set aside some extra cash to pay for it. Otherwise, you might be caught unaware.
It is also helpful for detecting Medicare Fraud. If you start noticing claims in your claim library for services you never received, it is time to report fraud. You will be doing yourself and your country a favor by turning the bad guys in.
Your Current Plan Information
The site also shows you relevant information about your current health care plan including your prescription drug plan and any supplemental insurance.
This is really useful around the Annual Enrollment Period. Knowing the plans you have in place is the first step in deciding if you want to switch and what you want to switch to. (Click here to read our thoughts about shopping around.)
Your Deductible Status
Under the “claims” tab, you can click on your deductible status link and find out how close you are to meeting your deductible. After you meet your deductible, plan benefits will begin. This is why your deductible status is important. You’ll have an idea what a service is going to cost before you receive it.
Your Preventative Care Scheduling
Medicare alone covers a lot of preventative services such as screenings and tests and certain types of counseling. They cover them in full, so you don’t have to pay a dime! Some are offered ever 2 years, some every 4, and some only every 6 or more years. It is difficult to know which ones you are eligible for on which years.
The preventative services page under the “my health” tab shows exactly what you are eligible for at any moment. This makes it extra easy to take advantage of the preventative services that are available to you. You’ve paid into Social Security for all those years for the benefits, so you might as well use them!
And overall, I think the best part of the site is that it is all in one place. Most—if not all— of the information you need to know about your health care is organized and at your fingertips. For the retiree like you who still has a lot going on, it’s a wise choice.
Have any concerns about your current plan? Looking to switch? Call Seniormark at 937-492-8800 to set up a free consultation.
About the Author
Ready to retire and unsure what to do next? Get our "Introduction to Medicare” eBook to start to make sense of Medicare and your options.