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Health & Fitness

Why Medicare Users Choose Medex Bronze over Medex Core on Cape Cod?

In three previous blog posts I wrote about why we seniors get any kind of Medicare supplement at allwhy we might choose a public Part C Medicare Advantage plan over private Medigap insurance (or vice versa), and then drilled deeper into that second subject here.

So if you worked your way through that decision process and decided you wanted private Medigap, the left-hand side of the Medicare and You decision tree, here's some good news (if you legally reside in Massachusetts or are otherwise entitled to buy Massachusetts Medigap plans): 

Forget about Medigap Plans A, B, C, N, and so forth as explained in Medicare and You booklet.  In Massachusetts, we only have two choices of private Medigap plans: Core and Supplement 1. 
You might not recognize those terms but -- as with Kleenex -- you will probably recognize the most popular Medigap brand names in Massachusetts: Blue Cross Medex and Medex Bronze. Medex is Core. Medex Bronze is Supplement-1. Despite the fact that people call them all Medex, which is Blue Cross' brand, in Massachusetts you can get almost exactly the same policy from AARP, Fallon, Health New England, Harvard, Humana, Readers Digest (in association with Humana) and Tufts.  (We're old here on Cape Cod. Everyone wants our business.)

The major differences between Medigap Core and Medigap Supplement-1 is the monthly premium and how they cover Medicare co-pays. Roughly, Supplement-1 is $100 a month more expensive than Core but covers all co-pays. 

So that's your next decision point. Do you want to try to save $1200 a year by choosing the less expensive form of Medigap insurance.  In making that decision, you have to estimate if you think you will go into the hospital during any given year.  Because if you do, with the cheaper Medigap it will cost you -- I bet you guessed already -- about $1200. You'e back to even. But if you are not hospitalized during the year, you paid $1200 more than you had to. So that's your bet.

(Naturally, it's not totally that simple. This is the government after all. More to come in a future post. And by choosing private Medigap, you also probably want to choose a Part D standalone drug plan.  More to come on Part D in a future blog post too.)


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