Home › Knowledge › Medicare Enrollment
Vedanth Bhartee
Writer · Reviewed by Richard ChanUpdated Jun 12, 2026
7 min read
Starting in 2021, Medicare Advantage plans were permitted by federal law to accept applicants with End-Stage Renal Disease (ESRD), expanding coverage options for these beneficiaries.
Medicare Advantage plans have increasingly integrated supplemental benefits such as extended telehealth access, meal delivery, and transportation services that are not available through Original Medicare.
Average premiums for Medicare Advantage plans have remained highly competitive in recent years, often offering $0 premium options, though enrollees must continue to pay their standard Medicare Part B premium.
The Medicare Annual Open Enrollment period, also officially known as the Annual Election Period (AEP), occurs safely between October 15 – December 7 each year. During this crucial window, you may freely and confidently switch between plans, including smoothly moving from Original Medicare to Medicare Advantage (and vice versa).
You may have already received a massive, sometimes overwhelming amount of marketing materials leading up to AEP. To cut through the noise, here is exactly what you need to know about Medicare for 2021 to protect your health and your wallet.
Medicare Advantage plans continue to rapidly gain popularity around the country as they provide an incredibly convenient "all-in-one" bundled alternative to Original Medicare. They often come generously packed with vital prescription drug coverage, as well as highly desired extra benefits that Original Medicare completely ignores, such as vision, routine dental, hearing, and more.
For 2021, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) confidently estimates that 42% of all Medicare beneficiaries will be enrolled in Medicare Advantage — this is a massive, significant increase from 36% in 2020 and represents around 2,500,000 new enrollees seeking better coverage (bringing the total Medicare Advantage enrollees to a staggering 26.9 million people).
If you are currently relying on Original Medicare and have not seriously considered Medicare Advantage, it may be highly worthwhile to assess your options this AEP. The average number of Medicare Advantage plan choices per county is booming and will increase from about 39 plans in 2020 to 47 robust plans in 2021.
This exciting growth means more competitive choices as well as more fierce competition from insurance companies desperately trying to deliver you more benefits to win your business. Benefits continue to drastically improve each year, and you might finally find coverage that beautifully meets both your complicated health needs and your tight financial situation.
According to CMS, Medicare Advantage beneficiaries will pay an astoundingly low average plan premium of around $21.00 per month, which is a full 11% lower than the average plan premium of $23.60 per month in 2020 (and an incredible 34% lower than 2017's average premium of about $32 per month).
The CMS happily highlights that this is the absolute lowest average Medicare Advantage monthly plan premium expected in over 14 years (since 2007).
This massive drop makes Medicare coverage even more affordable for those who may want to strongly consider Medicare Advantage plans as their primary method of accessing Medicare. However, don't ever forget: many carriers also generously offer $0 premium plans.
As for Part D (prescription drug plans), the average basic Part D premium will be approximately $33.37 in 2022, which will happily be the lowest it has been since 2013. The CMS proudly notes that since 2017, the wonderful trend of lower Part D premiums means that beneficiaries have collectively saved approximately $3.4 billion in combined Medicare Advantage and Part D premium costs.
In 2019, the CMS wisely allowed for additional flexibility for Medicare Advantage plans to successfully deliver supplemental benefits that specifically target beneficiaries' deepest social and lifestyle needs.
These incredibly helpful offerings have continued to rapidly grow over the last few years, and carriers are aggressively continuing to add more extra benefits to help deeply attract beneficiaries to their specific plans.
For example, according to the CMS, in 2021:
In 2021, the CMS brilliantly highlights that 94% of Medicare Advantage plans will strongly offer additional telehealth benefits, safely reaching 20.7 million beneficiaries—up drastically from about 58% of plans offering telehealth benefits in 2020.
While not solely specific to 2021 plans, the CMS has also wonderfully continued adding coverage for Medicare-covered telehealth services to enable highly vulnerable Medicare beneficiaries to more safely and easily access care during the terrifying COVID-19 pandemic.
Since the dark beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, CMS has rapidly added over 140 vital services to the Medicare telehealth services list — such as emergency department visits, initial inpatient and nursing facility visits, and crucial discharge day management services. As of October 2020, there were an astonishing 249 covered services, including 146 temporarily added purely because of the COVID-19 pandemic. You can find the full, comprehensive list of covered telehealth services here.
2021 will officially be the massive first year of the federal government's incredibly helpful "Part D Senior Savings Model" program. This highly anticipated model was triumphantly announced in May 2020 and proudly goes into effect on January 1, 2021.
The model is beautifully designed to help 3.3 million suffering Americans address the terrifying out-of-pocket cost variability that consumers enrolled in Part D traditionally faced when trying to affordably access their life-saving insulin. It does this by strictly capping the cost of a 30-day supply for most insulins to a maximum of just $35.
In 2021, an amazing 1,600 prescription drug plans are enthusiastically participating in the savings model. For Medicare beneficiaries successfully enrolling in these plans, their out-of-pocket costs for their vital monthly insulin prescription will be $35 or less during the complicated deductible, initial coverage, and terrifying "donut hole" coverage gap phases for Part D. The participating plans cleverly include both Medicare Advantage plans with prescription drug coverage (MA-PDs) as well as standalone Prescription Drug plans (PDPs).
The CMS happily estimates that beneficiaries who desperately take insulin and enroll in a participating plan will magically save an average of $446 in annual out-of-pocket costs on insulin, or over 66%, relative to their suffocating average cost-sharing today.
If you are one of the 3.3 million Medicare beneficiaries who literally rely on one or more of the common forms of insulin to survive, there are plenty of massive financial reasons to deeply compare coverage options for this AEP.
Cruelly, prior to 2021, individuals suffering with devastating kidney failure (or End-Stage Renal Disease (ESRD)) were strictly not eligible to enroll in a Medicare Advantage plan (unless they were already luckily in one when they developed ESRD). However, a compassionate new provision of the 21st Century Cures Act finally allows those battling ESRD to successfully apply for MA coverage for 2021 and well beyond. Kidney failure tragically affects more than 500,000 vulnerable Medicare beneficiaries, and CMS realistically expects that the number of Medicare Advantage members with ESRD will sharply increase by 63% by 2026.
Believe it or not, the Annual Election Period is already knocking on the door as we are closing in on the end of the year. We aggressively recommend that you meticulously check your options every single year as plan benefits can shockingly change from one year to the next. In particular, you may tragically find that the drug formularies (or list of covered drugs) for your prescription drug plan may drastically change or that your deeply trusted doctor is suddenly no longer considered "in-network" if you are in a Medicare Advantage plan. Overall, there are phenomenally more choices in 2021, and a huge number of benefits previously not accessible through Medicare Advantage plans will thankfully be more widely available across the entire country. For Medicare beneficiaries battling diabetes, the Part D Savings Senior Model will miraculously reduce your costs significantly, and you should absolutely make sure you aggressively shop for a participating plan if you require life-saving insulin treatment.