Quote:
Originally Posted by MSGirl
Which Supplemental plan do you have? My mother had Plan F, which cost her close to $300 per month. Do you also have Part D ( the drug plan) ? What do you pay for that? Do you have a supplemental dental and optical plan as well?
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There is a crucially important point here which some (many?) of us are not aware of. I wasn't until our former employer chose to go out of the 'health care for retirees' business.
(Aside: Can an employer really do that? Evidently, because our employer did. We were left with a buyout plus dental and vision benefits. And why? Because these were union negotiated benefits! Think about that....)
Suddenly the choice of Medicare Supplement plan or Advantage plan was dropped in our laps. That was when we discovered
—and this is the part that's crucially important—that insurance companies can charge whatever they wish for coverage in, as in the quote above, Plan F, but the reality is that
Plan F is Plan F!
The benefits of the different Supplement plans are negotiated between the insurance compnuhj Medicare, and the benefits of every Plan F are identical to the benefits of every other Plan F! (Same, of course, for all the other Medicare Supplement plans. When we retirees had to take over, we found that our employer had us all in a Mutual of Omaha Medicare Supplement plan, which cost almost exactly $100 more per month than the Supplement plan identical in every way sponsored by United HealthCare!