Usually, after age 65, you have two Medicare options: Traditional Medicare (Parts A , B and D and often a Medigap plan ) or a private health insurer’s Medicare Advantage plan , also called Part C. But increasingly, people with retiree health benefits from their former employers aren’t given that choice. Instead, they’re told they can only enroll in a Medicare Advantage plan , with its limited network of doctors and hospitals—even if they’d prefer going with the less restrictive Traditional Medicare.
Reject the Medicare Advantage plan, they’re told, and they’ll lose their retiree health benefits, sometimes in perpetuity. “It’s a lot to ask someone potentially to consider giving up their retiree benefits,” says Meredith Freed, a senior policy manager with the Program on Medicare Policy at KFF, a nonpartisan health care policy research, polling and journalism group. A new KFF report found that 12 states now offer only Medicare Advantage to their Medicare-eligible retirees, a 50% rise from 2016.
The 12 states: Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Missouri, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. While only 21% of big employers offer health benefits to retirees (down from 66% in 1988), roughly two-thirds of large companies that offered retirees Medicare Advantage in 2023 didn’t permit them to enroll in Traditional Medicare, according to KFF. In 2022, just 44% of those firms allowed Medicare Advantage-only.
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