i'm going to talk about medigap plan fhd and medigap plan ghd and these are a couple of
medicare supplement plans that you might have heard of but you might not have gotten a lot
of information on so i'm going to show you exactly when they might make a lot of sense
and when they might actually save you a lot of money on your medicare coverage i'm keith
arnbrecht founder of medicare on video and i help people across the country make the right medicare
choices and i can absolutely help you as well one of the best parts about what i do there's
no cost to you to allow me to help so hopefully you'll take advantage of everything that we have
to offer but right now we're going to talk about these two plans fhd and ghd and when
again they might make sense and might save you a lot of money so first off what is a medigap
plan and it's the same as a medicare supplement plan it's designed to fill the gaps in original
medicare a and b so medicare and b cover a lot but they don't cover everything
so medicare supplements are designed to cover the things that a and b do not and when you talk about
medicare supplements you generally hear about these three plans plan f plan g and plan n and
they are by far the most popular and in most cases make the most sense so you would generally in most
cases end up either on plan f plan g or plan n and but there are certain parts of the country
where things are a little bit different and then that would be where we toss in these two kind of
sideliners the fhd and the ghd and you can see based on the check marks they're pretty similar so
an fhd is pretty much exactly the same as an f and a ghd is pretty much exactly the same as a g
the only difference is that hd part and what exactly would the hd part be and it stands for
high deductible so that's what makes it different than f and g is it adds a high deductible and i
can tell you right now in these days it ought to be called be called regular deductible because
it's not as high as some make it out to be so the deductible on fhd or ghd is exactly the same
right now it's 23.70 and i don't know a whole lot of people coming into medicare coming
off of your insurance that you have right now whether it's at work or whether it's individual
that have a deductible less than 23.70 so again it's all kind of relative and the only reason we
would consider adding this type of deductible onto our plan is to lower our cost so we want to get as
low a premium as we possibly can when it makes sense and possibly take on a higher deductible
if it makes sense on the premium side of things so how does this all work so if you have come
into medicare and you're going to have a and b so you're going to have a and b no matter what
and if you're going to get a supplement to cover the gaps let's talk about a and b by themselves so
first of all first of all you have part a which covers inpatient hospital stuff so when you go
in the hospital that's what part a covers now part a has a pretty big deductible so it's deductible
when you go in the hospital is 1484. so that's what you're going to be responsible for in the
hospital obviously not a deductible we'd want to have when we go in the hospital so we absolutely
want to look to have that covered part a also has co-insurance if you're in the hospital for
an extended period of time so if you're there for more than 60 days you're going to start to pay
a co-pay on room charges for the hospital also not something we want to have part b
comes out at 80 20. so medicare pays 80 percent you're responsible for 20 percent and then it also
has an annual deductible of 203 dollars not a very big deductible manageable but we want to figure
out all this together to see what makes sense on a medicare supplement plan in most parts of
the country we want to get a g or an n and cover all this stuff that that a and b have gaps in but
if the premium is too high then it makes sense to look at kind of alternative or creative solutions
so when you have this fhd or ghd you have that 2370 deductible so in other words you're going
to pay those parts of a and b that aren't covered until you reach the 23.70 once you reach 23.70
during the year and it runs from january january your plan pays a hundred percent after that
so there's no more out of pocket expense after you have been out of pocket 23.70 and you can see from
what medicare doesn't pay really the only time you're ever going to get anywhere near that out
of pocket of 23.70 is with a hospital admission where you have that big part a deductible so
outside of that if you're just running to doctors visits and outpatient stuff and you're paying 20
versus medicare paying 80 it's not going to get anywhere near the out-of-pocket deductible on an
fhd or ghd so that kind of makes a lot of sense but again why would we want to do it this way and
quite simply the premium savings so first off we need to understand who qualifies for which plan
and they kind of changed this back in 2020 and it confuses people all the time so if you turn 65
before january 1 2020 it would be fhd turn 65 after january 1 2020 it's ghd and guess
what they're exactly the same there's zero difference between them including the cost
it's just an fhd versus a ghd so just whether or not you turn 65 before or after january 1 2020.
and why would we want to have one of these plants and specifically in parts of the
country where premiums are higher for g and for n and certainly for f we would want to
consider an fhd or a ghd in those states primarily in new york connecticut vermont
sometimes florida sometimes california where premiums for plan g can be more than 200
a month it makes sense to look at an alternative so i'll show you exactly how it works when you
look at it so let's look at mary in miami who is turning 65 she's in zip code 33101 and for her
the best plan g in miami is 241 dollars a month that's a crazy premium for plan g in most parts
of the country it averages closer to 100 a month so why in certain parts of the country
it's more i can't tell you that but when it is we need to figure things out that are different
you can see her planned ghd premium would be 61 a month so we have 241 a month for a g or 61 for
a ghd so you can see the annual premium is 28.94 for that g 732 for the ghd and again what's the
difference the only difference is that deductible so here we're going to have an annual savings of
2162 to cover that twenty three hundred dollar and change deductible why would you buy a plan g and
pay twenty one hundred dollars more in premium to cover twenty three hundred and change deductible
just doesn't make any sense and much better idea to pay yourself as you go during the year if you
want put the money away from the 732 versus the 28 94 and then if you do get admitted to the hospital
you've got it to cover the part a deductible if you don't go in the hospital then guess what it's
yours to keep it makes a lot of sense financially some people understand it some people you know
i always say it's it's always a great idea to sleep better at night too if you're happier with
things just buttoned up you don't have to worry about deductibles and things like that and being
creative then you know it might make sense to have a plan g regardless but anyway those are the
reasons you want to consider and it's absolutely worth putting it on the table to talk about so
if you are entering medicare and you want to discuss this give me a call send me an email
we can go through g and n and fhd and ghd and whatever it may be and figure out what makes
the most value that's what we're looking for is to make the best value for your medicare choices so
i hope you found this helpful if you have any questions give me a call have a fantastic day