medicare mini course day five graduation day so we've made it through the basic parts of medicare
hopefully you've watched the other parts of the mini course and we're trying to piece everything
together as easy as we can so i'm gonna keep everything simple right now we're going to talk
about medicare drug plans and medicare drug plans i could do an entire mini-course on they are more
complicated than the other pieces of medicare but we're going to try and keep it as simple because
it's important to understand how they work so that we know how to get what's going to work
for us so i'm keith armbruck founder of medicare on video and i help people across the country
make the right medicare choices i can absolutely help you as well hopefully you'll allow me to
help you there's no cost to use my services and that's how i make my living helping with medicare
supplement plans so i'm going to go through this right now and show you exactly what you need to
know about medicare part d something else you will find helpful if you're coming into medicare
or even if you're already there is a copy of my book medicare made clear i put a lot of time and
effort into this book and i'm giving it away for free so you can see here it covers just about
every piece of medicare it even has videos in the book where i explain everything it has all the
links on where to get the things you need and how to sign up things like that so take just a minute
medicare on video dot com forward slash free book you can download it right now and it's
yours to keep i hope you find it very helpful medicare part d drug plans one of the things
they actually lined up with the letter is d is for drug plans so is it mandatory and the answer
is no you do not have to have a drug plan however if you don't get one when you're first eligible
and then you want to get one later you can it's a little complicated but there's also a penalty but
it's always kind of a tough choice if you don't take any prescription drugs
currently should you buy a medicare drug plan and there are different opinions on that
i likely would not even though there's a penalty later you likely will save more in premium
when you don't need it than what the penalty is going to cost you down the road if you do need it
so that's a whole different conversation but just important to understand most
people do get it when they first come into medicare and you get a very low cost one
if you're worried about a penalty later even if you don't take prescription drugs now
so it's important to understand that so how much does a medicare drug plan cost
and again premium can be as low as 750 a month however that's not going to cover a whole lot of
prescription drugs that might be one if you're worried about the penalty later and you want to
just have one now but the typical kind of standard medicare drug plan probably going to be about 20
25 a month so it's not an outrageous amount it does have a deductible and then it does have
tiers and co-insurance levels and again it's more complicated and we can help you with that and make
sure you understand it and make sure we put it in place correctly and then if we need to change
later due to drugs changing then we can do that as well so right now there is a 480 dollar
deductible that's a maximum and then there's tiers one two three four and five you know
if you've had experience with your regular group health plan you probably know how a tier one drug
works and a tier two drug works you know it goes up in cost is basically about how it functions so
the coverage levels under medicare drug plans are as follows first you have your deductible where
you're going to be responsible for your deductible before your plan's going to pay and then it put
you into the initial coverage level that's where most people stay so most people don't ever get
out of the initial coverage level but if you do it if you had a lot of drug use during the year
it might put you into what you heard is the donut hole where there's a coverage gap and
only about 12 percent of the people ever get into the donut hole but it's not a place you want to be
it's it's certainly less coverage in that donut hole and then god forbid you're taking you know
massive amount of drugs during the year you might reach the catastrophic level where things
kind of come back to good coverage but it's rare only about four people ever get to the
catastrophic level but you can get there if you're taking you know cancer medication or something
like that so this is something we got to manage we got to manage medicare part d plans to make
sure they keep up with whatever your prescription drug scenario is so you can change your drug plan
at the end of each year and when to enroll the initial enrollment period is when you would jump
in so right when you start into medicare or there is that special enrollment period
where if you enroll after age 65 so if you're retired you come off a group plan
that is when you would look to get into your medicare supplement plan and then when can you
change you can change at the end of each year when you see all those billion of commercials on tv
talking about medicare advantage stuff that's also medicare drug plan open enrollment is when you can
change your medicare drug plan you have to make your choice between october 15th and december 7th
it goes into effect on january 1st this says july but it's actually january 1st so it's something we
got to look at every year to make sure that if your drugs change that we can change everything
for the better in a drug plan so that kind of gives you a pretty good overview on medicare
drug plans and again graduation day so we're done with the mini course certainly if you have
questions if there's anything that we can do to help that's what we do is we help with medicare
so hope you found this helpful have a fantastic day hey don't go anywhere these are some of my
most recent videos right here you can also find the link right below this video to download
my book medicare made clear absolutely free you can also subscribe to my channel
right here so please download my book watch some videos subscribe to the channel have a great day