I was sitting in my kitchen last week when something very big came crashing through my mail slot and landed BANG! CRASH! on my floor.
What was it? I thought maybe it was the Sears catalog but then I realized that Sears stopped mailing its loaf-sized catalog in 1993. Next, I thought maybe my complete boxed DVD set of The West Wing had finally arrived from Netflix. But then, no, I realized that Netflix “officially” stopped mailing out DVDs back in 2014. (If you like conspiracy theories, you have probably heard that Netflix is still secretly mailing DVDs to an enigmatic group of billionaires who live in remote places like the Ozarks. We don’t think that is true.)
No, the large item that thudded onto my floor was the Official Medicare Handbook, “Medicare & You 2023.”
How many of these Medicare handbooks were mailed out this year? Medicare.gov is not publishing that number, perhaps they are embarrassed to admit how expensive it must have been to print this big 131-page handbook and then mail it. (Granted, Medicare must have gotten a preferential postage rate on the mailing, but still . . .) But we do know that more than 61 million Americans were covered by Medicare in 2022, and Medicare claims to have sent the guide to all its members. All the information in the handbook can be found online at Medicare.gov, so you don’t have to even open the printed handbook. But no matter how you split the pills, it’s clear that it cost a lot of money to print and mail copies of “Medicare & You” to Medicare end-users like you and me.
Is Medicare & You 2023 Worth Reading?
“Medicare & You” is an exceptionally good publication. It is well organized, and it provides just tons of very useful information. It has clearly been carefully planned and organized by excellent editors.
The problem is that when you start using it, you quickly get confused. Even though the writers and editors did their level best to make all the information clear and accessible, there is just too much information there. All the clear organization in the world will not enable people like me (and possibly you?) to quickly find an answer to the basic question, “Which Medicare plan is best for me?”
By way of example, let me just mention Section 11 in the guide, “Compare health & drug plans in your area.” I was pleased to see that only information that pertained to my state of residence had been included in the guide I received. That was good! But even with that focused limitation, I found no fewer than 11 pages of detailed information there, outlining Medicare Advantage and other plans available here.
And when I started to wade in and try to identify the best plan for me, I started to feel like a swarm of yellow jackets had shown up in a football helmet I was wearing. Each of those yellow jackets represented one piece of information, but there was no way for me to get them to stop swarming so I could organize and understand anything.
A Better Way to Figure it Out & Enroll in Medicare!
I don’t want to imply that “Medicare & You 2023” isn’t an excellent, comprehensive guide to picking the best Medicare plan for next year. The problem is that there is just too much information in it. Somewhere in it, you can find the Medicare plan that is right for you.
But it is kind of like handing a water glass to a swimmer in Lake Michigan and saying, “There is one glass of water out there somewhere that is just right for you, now go find it!”
That analogy explains why you will save a ton of time – and find just the right plan a lot faster – if you simply use the online platform or call CoverRight and let one of our Medicare plan experts guide you to the right plan. After asking you some simple questions, of course.
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CoverRight is on a mission to make the Medicare plan selection process easy to understand. We are here to help you compare Medicare plans and find the one best suited to your specific situation. Try the platform for yourself.
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