Do you have health care benefits through your retirement package from your past employer? If so, please pay close attention as you could be making a vital Medicare error.
We recently had a 70-year old woman come into our office for Medicare help. She was on a Teacher’s Retirement Plan. She thought that the retirement from the Teacher’s Association would be sufficient enough to meet both healthcare and Medicare rules.
Unfortunately, she was very misled and didn’t understand how her health insurance went and how it worked when it came to Medicare.
What she didn’t realize was that she needed to be on Medicare Part A and Part B in conjunction with her retiree plan. That means, since she was 65, she didn’t have Part A or B. Thus, she is now facing very extensive and costly penalties for not complying with Medicare rules.
How her retiree plan and Medicare worked together was not properly explained to her in the beginning.
Our piece of advice to you is that you can stay on a retiree plan but be very careful. Many of those plans require you to join certain parts of Medicare. Unfortunately, we have now found two major retirement plans with bad information about Medicare inside of their benefit package and all their documents.
We are working with those companies to try to have them change the language so that it’s accurate.
Once again, if you fall into the category of getting health insurance after 65 through a retirement program. Please be careful. Medicare is extremely complicated, and we are finding that many of the benefits that companies offer don’t fully understand them. As a result, they are misrepresenting and misstating the facts when it comes to Medicare and ultimately, you could pay the price for it.
