United States Medicare Open Enrollment Scheduled for January This Year, Not October

Actually Medicare open enrollment -- called "general enrollment" by the Medicare bureaucrats -- is scheduled for January every year. It talkes place between January and March of each year with your Medicare coverage -- both A and B or just B if you already have A going into effect in July.

Do not be confused by all the hoopla in the press starting soon about Medicare "open enrollment" being in October and November¹.  The October-November timeframe refers to public supplements and only applies to you if you are already on Medicare. And you have to be on both Medicare Parts A and B -- called Original Medicare by the Medicare bureaucrats. Original Medicare is usually mislabeled by the press as "traditional Medicare" (which has a different meaning).

Specifically, the Medicare open enrollment hoopla that typically starts in the press each September refers to enrollment in Part C and Part D Medicare health plans, not Medicare itself. Medicare health plans are supplements to Original Medicare. You have to already have both Part A and Part B to select one of these public² supplements.

• If you are not already on Original Medicare at all or you only have Medicare Part A, and you do not have a a good reason (e.g., a good reason for not having it at all would be that you are just turning 65; a good reason for having A but not B is that you have been working and are now going to retire; there are other good reasons), you cannot purchase a Medicare health plan during public supplemental health plan open enrollment.
• On the other hand, if you are just turing 65 or just retiring, you can select a Medicare health plan twice... once for the rest of 2014 as soon as eligble and another for 2015 during the October-November timeframe. (And if you are on George Bush's Extra Help plan for Parts C and D, you can change Part C or Part D plans every month if you want.)

So again the October-November timeframe hoopla is just that, a lot of press hoopla.

By the way, there are a whole different set of rules -- chosen by your former employer -- if you are on retiree insurance. See another future blog post.

¹The actual relevant period is October 15 to December 7 with the necessary information to make a decision available October 1. You will receive the 2015 Medicare and You booklet in September if you are eligible for a supplemental Medicare health plan (that is, you are already on Medicare). You should not wait until the last week of the enrollment period.

²More about the difference between private and public supplements in an upcoming post. The press gets this all wrong too.