#22 – A Little About Medicare

Today’s first comment is a metric: I think the last comment posted from someone besides me for this blog was about two months ago, if I don’t count the couple of vendors wanting to show me just how much money I can make blogging if I sign up for their service (they’re talking to the wrong rookie blogger). Not to worry- if I end up connecting with an old classmate or friend every other week, that metric is good enough for me to keep plodding along. The fact that I’ve told less than twenty people about this blog might have something to do with these results.

You can get some pretty interesting metrics from the blog service provider. One stat is that it supposedly tells you what country the blog visitors are from. This week it shows that someone from Argentina was checking out the blog for a while.

One of the certain signs that you’re approaching 65 years old- if you’re an American citizen (more on that later)- is the volume of Medicare-related mail coming in either via snail mail or email. For interest’s sake I kept most of it…more than 100 pieces of regular mail. It probably started arriving shortly after hitting 63. Eventually I started reading through it all. Easy to get confused.

(Now that I’ve reread the Medicare manual, I realize even trying to hit the highlights would turn this post into a short novel, so I’m giving up on that modest goal)

Bottom lines.

• Mainly, there’s Medicare Parts A, B, C, D. If you’re payroll’s been paying into Medicare for a minimum number of years/credits, you’ll be eligible for Part A without additional cost, and you’ll have to sign up for Part B (monthly cost, roughly $145 – $165).
• Part C (Medicare Advantage plans) and Part D (prescriptions) are optional. If you have Tricare, you won’t need C or D, but it’s worth reading up on these sections.
• When you hit 65, you HAVE to sign up for Medicare (if you hadn’t already), and in most instances Medicare becomes your primary provider (for us who’ve been using Tricare via the military, Tricare becomes your secondary). The window for signing up is your birth month plus or minus three months. If you let this window pass, I understand you end up paying a penalty.
• You have to establish your Social Security online account in order to sign up for Medicare.
• Highly recommend you spend time reading and listening to Medicare-related resources to become educated on this since you’ll be doing Medicare for the rest of your life, and your health is probably going to deteriorate from here on out. You want to learn ahead of time what medical services Medicare does/does not cover.

I made one dumb mistake- waited until after my birthday, but still well within the window, to sign up. Only then did I find out that Tricare prescription service disappears the day after you turn 65 unless you’re signed up for Medicare.

I learned something else from this process- technically, I am not a US citizen (don’t tell all the DoD agencies who approved my security clearances for 40 years). Something happened, legal-wise, after September 11, 2001 which required those of us not born in the US to provide the USG more evidence of our birth (in my case, that I was born outside the US when my active duty father was assigned overseas). Thanks to the pandemic, we’re still sorting that out.

So far Medicare seems to have worked as advertised. I’m still not happy about paying extra per month for no additional medical services.

Last recommendation, especially as you contemplate your health in your latter years:

Watch a documentary, called “Eating You Alive” which can be found on Youtube.