- CMS has changed Medicare.gov,
the go-to site for us to quote Part D for our clients
for the past eight years and it's gonna hurt,
so stay tuned to this video to find out
what you can do to work around this.
(air whooshing)
Hello, I'm back.
I'm Sylvia Gordon with Gordon Marketing.
We're talking about the new Medicare.gov plan finder.
This is what it looks.
These are the new screenshots.
If you would like some of these CMS approved screenshots
to use in your social media marketing or on your website,
we have them in English and Spanish,
they're royalty free, they are approved for use
and if you hit me up in the comments,
we can send them for you that you can legally use right now
because that's what you need on social media
is you need new ideas that stir up the waters
so that people go, I don't get this, and they call you.
So right now, you're coming to me
because you don't get this either.
I'm gonna educate you so you can go educate your people.
Medicare.gov plan finder reviews for years
and a lot of you have hundreds,
maybe thousands of your clients drug lists saved
in Medicare.gov's plan finder.
That's all going away.
Poof.
Then you have to go to your client and say,
hey, could you give me your drug list again?
That takes a long time.
Either in person or on the phone trying to figure out
what drug they're talking about,
are they doing it from memory,
are they looking at the pill bottle, can they spell it,
are they struggling to see the bottle, et cetera.
You've been there.
You know how time-consuming and frustrating this part is.
That's why you love Medicare.gov
because you've saved that data in there
and every year all you do is you say,
hey, Betty, have any of your drugs changed?
No.
Great.
Boom, hit compare and it gives you a baseline
to start making a recommendation for your client.
Go in there now before the government erases all the data.
Now I've queried probably a dozen agents
that have over 800 clients each
and I said, do you have a screenshot?
Did you save those drug lists
in your CRM or your hard files?
Or did you just leave it on the government site?
And about 50% of them only have it on the government site.
Ouch.
- Doh!
- That hurts.
If you don't get on this.
If you don't pay attention to this video
and please God, share this with your friends
and other agents, this video.
The minute you go in there
to do the list comparison, it's gone.
So you have to get a hold of your client
and go through the whole trouble to recreate this list.
Now you're gonna have to retype this list in no matter what,
but at least if you have printed out a copy of it right now,
you're way ahead of the majority of agents
that aren't gonna watch this video
and don't know that this is looming.
Go in right now.
Have one of your assistants print off all the drug lists
so that at least you have that starting point.
What you will have to do when we go to the new plan finder,
which will be on the Blue Button
or go back to Medicare.gov,
but you have to login as a guest.
You won't be able to pull up your clients' profile,
you'll have to login brand new as a guest
and put in all their drugs.
That's where we are right now.
The question is why did the government do this?
Well,
the government wants to have
a better technological platform, tablet, cell phone,
laptop, so that the Medicare beneficiary,
the 60 million people on Medicare right now
can more easily access their benefits,
find out what Medicare pays, what their plan pays,
do those plan comparisons for themselves,
and when I say for themselves, your ears should perk up,
and you should say,
is that secret code for without an agent?
It is.
The carriers, all of them, they love us,
but they want to get rid of us,
and if you were the carrier, you would too.
They want to cut out the agent and save that money.
So if they can just dump it all online
and the consumer is savvy enough to just go shop online,
that saves them a lot of money.
The Medicare Blue Button,
which I don't have up here right now,
but it is on Medicare.gov, you have to sign up for it,
and nobody knows about it.
Nobody's used it, it's been there a long time,
it's not new, but nobody's used it,
and the governments making a big push to make it
more viable and that will continue to grow.
I just want to sound the alarm
because there's some rumblings out there in insurance fear
on the insurance forums and some of the blogs
about the big change in the Medicare.gov plan finder
and the rumor that I keep hearing over and over again
is that it's going away.
Not true.
Still going to be there.
All your clients data is going away.
Now is the time to take action and go in there
and get that client data out of there.
That will give you a real leg up
on this really laborious process
of typing in everybody's drugs,
which you're gonna have to do.
So thank you for watching my video.
Like I said, if you would like some of these screenshots
to use on social media or some ideas on what you could post
on social media to stir up more interest
with your database about this new change,
hit me up in the comments
and I'll be happy to send them to you, thanks.