medicare choices & satisfaction

[tsptalk]

Hi Jon -

If you can form your poll question in a short statement, will specific response choices, I will post it as the day's poll on the home page.

Also, you can create a poll yourself right here on the board if you'd like. It is an option when you start a new thread.

Thanks,
Tom

 

[luv2read]

Thank you, I'm glad I could be of some help.

 

[jon]

Love your memory. When I looked under Retirement Planning, there was a thread, Medical insurance in retirement. A topic there or nearby addressed issue of taking Part B or not, while keeping Fed. Health benefits. Looks like its a gamble one way or the other, depending on future costs of each option, plan and their benefits. Thanks, for the memory.

Its a strange experience when you look at an ordinary object on your table, or you are in the middle of a sentence and just stop because you can't immediately remember the name of the object, person or place you were about to refer to for maybe 10- 15 seconds. I sometimes wonder what others are thinking about us when we suddenly go silent. For me they could easily be thinking, well at last he's learned to listen better, even if its in the middle of his own sentence.

 

[luv2read]

Hi Jon,

If I remember correctly this gets a bit of discussion every open season, and there might be a thread on it in the Planning Your Retirement forum here.

 

[jon]

How many members now have Medicare and about how many more members will join Medicare annually? The variables in Medicare options remind me of chemistry formulas. Do you think members/ guests might be interested in other members experiences/ recommendations? I wonder if such data could best be presented in some kind of table or chart?

I was looking for some free or fee paid database on the internet that one could plug in various options/ health senarios, including the cost of the options to try to determine the best value package going into Medicare. I didn't find a d/b so I decided to ring up Kaiser in CA to see if they knew about any d/b evaluation tool. I explained to the service rep what I wanted and that I was a recently retired Fed. She cut to the chase and recommended keeping my Fed health ins. policy or some other retired ee. health benefits along with Medicare A & B, if I could afford to do so. She said many Fed retirees in CA keep their Fed health benefits observing that in CA Fed retirees with their existing Fed. health ins do not have to pay for Part B, unlike the rest of the states. She implied that Fed retired ee health benefits are less risky to have for the future vs other Medicare options. So now I thinking about switching to a lower cost Fed health policy, otherwise I'm looking at around $500/mo insurance costs for single person with 2 dental policies including $96/mo for Part B.

I suspect very few members will read this post since its so far removed from bulk of posts pertaining to markets, funds and IFT's. Could readers interest in Medicare issues/choices be one of the survey questions on TSP Talk home page?

Jon