STATNEWS: Health insurers are painting a misleading picture of Medicare Advantage savings, experts s

[ShazzieB]

8. Saving "the taxpayers" money is a different thing from how the plans work for those using them.

I honestly have no idea what effect advantage plans have on that large amorphous body known as "the taxpayers," and I will admit that as my husband approaches retirement, I know he and I are, OF NECESSITY, going to have to make a decision based on what is most financially effective for US, personally.

And when I say "of necessity," I mean exactly that. Our income is going to shrink, a lot, and we will have to make every dollar of that income go as far as possible. If my concerns seem selfish to anyone else, all I can say is sorry, not sorry. I'm talking about survival here. We admittedly did not do as good of a job saving for retirement as we ideally should have, for a variety of reasons, not all of which have been under our control. And our time machine is broken, so there's nothing we can do about that now.

Every time I've seen a thread about Medicare Advantage plans here at DU, it seems to be full of posts about how terrible these plans are AND posts about how wonderful they are. The comments in some of these threads swing so wildly from one extreme to another that reading them is enough to give a person whiplash, and I invariably end up feeling more confused when I'm done than I was before I started.

What I would say to you or anyone else who has a plan that you feel is working well for you is this: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. 😉

For those of us who still have to choose a plan (both the type of plan and the specific one), I don't know what the answer is. All I know is that I'm scared to death of making the wrong choice and being out more money than we can afford. And reading the threads on DU about this stuff (the ones I've seen so far anyway) hasn't been much help.