I Have Done A VERY BAD Job Of This
The 62-64 year olds have been reached, or so I like to think they have. Turn on the financial press, type in “Medicare” in Google, yep, Maximize Your Medicare (available for pre-order ahem) can be found.
That is not actually the point, because that person is obvious. The ripple effects are many times larger, a single person will have 10s of people they know, who would benefit from greater clarity. And I have not done well in reaching the people that need to help their family member or friend. Perhaps that hill is too steep.
Nah.
Senior Parents Hand You The Administrative Pile
Ah, the adult child. That is entirely different. The pre-Medicare, adult-aged children have NO IDEA that Medicare doesn’t work the same. Sometimes, that is because the senior parent is still attempting to protect their child from their worries.
Yabit, the parent can be compromising their financial condition by overpaying (by a lot) for outdated plans. Yabit, the parent may have to hand over the task, under duress.
Jose G
Very simply, mother and father are in their mid-80s. Jose knew enough that an HMO wouldn’t work in his parents’ situation, for one reason or another. That is their private business. He put his hand up (out). His parents will be sorted on January 1 to make the desired change, which has an entirely reasonable logic, no question, given the circumstances, which I vetted for free (duh).
It can very easily be that since people don’t know that a very very very competitive market exists, the Medicare Advantage or Part D plan is going to be obsolete for one reason or another. There are technical reasons that the plans are not simply discontinued (the administrative costs and loss of enrollees to the carrier would be enormous). SO, that leaves the parent with an obsolete, over-priced plan. This can cost $3000+ a year for a couple, easily.
Peggy K
It’s one thing for you to know that your lifelong friend has a fundamental misunderstanding of a financial topic. It is entirely different for you to intervene and point your friend in the right direction.
Peggy K handled it just right. She knows that she isn’t qualified to specifically address the fact that her friend was on the wrong track. Yet something needed to be done. Her friend didn’t understand Late Enrollment Penalties, but once explained, her friend realized that she needed to address this, even with restrained financial resources. Murphy’s Law would’ve run amuck, if left unaddressed. Peggy K effectively stopped that from happening.
Reason This Stuff Is Mostly Free
The specific audience doesn’t matter. Professional/laborers, rich/challenged: no one fully understands the how Medicare works, and that is just the beginning. In the backdrop is a huge combination of enormous stakeholders with logical, rational motivations.
In the backdrop is a federal government that has to deal with multiple public policy objectives while under fiscal and demographic duress. In the backdrop is an employer that is faced with lower tax revenues, or fierce commercial competition. In the backdrop is a set of healthcare providers that have potential endless legal liability, and the barriers to entry are very high.
Combined, the commercial market would be expected to change: this should be self-evident. We don’t need my Ivy League background or global financial markets experience to understand this, an owner of a local grocer would be able to connect the dots.
That said, the technical details are many, and do need to be right. Thanks to Wade Pfau, which refers to Maximize Your Medicare inside his newly-published book. The American College is the organization that awards CLU ChFC among others, to other financial professionals.
Bottom line is that y’all know someone that should know more, because the downside is either lost money or fewer benefits, or both (blech). Medicare has rules that are almost entirely in the buyer’s favor. The options are crazy valuable, at the lowest conceivable price, all the way to zero. Now you can attach my options trading background: cheap options is my “thing,” and it should be everybody’s.
Very simple: forward the email to someone, so that you can be like Jose or Peggy. That will be far more effective than my crappy YouTube videos.
Official website for Maximize Your Medicare (click here)