Medicare Advantage Plan Reviews: Honest Pros, Cons & Real Experiences

Read real Medicare Advantage reviews, including pros, cons, costs, coverage, and user experiences to help you choose the best Medicare plan for your needs.

that choosing your Medicare insurance coverage can be one of the most important decisions you make in retirement so it's very natural to want to look for reviews and see what other people are saying about these different types of plans that are available to you and I have a lot of videos that go over Medicare supplement insurance

what are the best Medicare supplement plans and how to compare Medicare supplement plans to Medicare Advantage plans but in today's video I'm going to specifically talk about Medicare Advantage plan reviews I'm going to touch on how these plans work and I'm going to review some real life feedback that we've received on these plans things that you'll want to see before you make a decision for yourself

Medicare Advantage Plan Overview

foreign plans can be a little bit polarizing you'll find some people that love them some people that hate them in addition there are many Medicare agents that only sell Medicare Advantage plans and a lot of times they only talk about the positive aspects of these plans

so today I really want to show you a balanced review on both sides to start with it's very important to know the difference between traditional Medicare and Medicare Advantage and this is one of the most commonly misunderstood Concepts when it comes to Medicare and for a more in-depth look on how Medicare Advantage compares to Medigap which works with traditional Medicare be sure to click the video in the description below

How Medicare Advantage Works

the everyone on Medicare has two main choices on how they can get their Medicare benefits in order to join a Medicare Advantage plan you must be enrolled in Medicare Parts A and B and you must live in that planned service area now many Medicare Advantage plans are zero dollars a month you must

continue to pay your Medicare Part B premium for most people that is 164.90 per month in 2023 so you have to keep paying that no matter which path you choose but many Medicare Advantage plan are zero dollars a month they include part D prescription drug coverage and many plans include some

dental or vision benefits all rolled into the plan so a lot of people ask me well what's the catch how can these plans be zero dollars a month and offer these additional benefits well there are a few things you want to keep in mind first of all these plans are network plans like

HMO or PPO plans they work with a specific network of doctors and typically you have to stay in network in order to receive services on a PPO plan you can go out of network but you are required to pay more generally for out-of-network services also on a Medicare Advantage plan

you are responsible for set co-pays and co-insurance amounts that you pay for services that you receive as you go and you pay until you've reached your plans maximum out of pocket limit for the year now I have a few other blogg that go over the pros and cons of Medicare Advantage plans I'm going to link that below so be sure to watch that as well if you're considering

Medicare Advantage but today I want to look at some real life reviews from people that are actually on Medicare Advantage plans so first I'm going to highlight some data-driven studies that have been done on Medicare beneficiaries that are enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans and then I'm going to talk about some general feedback that I receive here in my office from people that are enrolled in Medicare Advantage

Study Findings and Positive Reviews

now in 20 22 the Kaiser Family Foundation released a report it was titled beneficiary experience affordability utilization and quality in Medicare Advantage and traditional Medicare a review of the literature and I'm going to link that below and this report

reviewed 62 studies that were published since 2016 that compared Medicare Advantage and traditional Medicare on a number of measures but the general finding from this study was that overall Medicare Advantage enrollees and traditional Medicare beneficiaries reported similar satisfaction

with their levels of care now again there's a ton of great data in this study it's linked below and I'm going to dive into more of it shortly here so this study showed some positive things in regards to Medicare Advantage people enrolled in Medicare Advantage were more likely than those on traditional

Medicare to report receiving preventative Services such as annual Wellness visits and routine checkups screenings and getting immunized against influenza or pneumonia so people on Medicare Advantage plans were more likely to receive preventative Services and when talking about some of the positive aspects of Medicare

Advantage a lot of people love that their Medicare Advantage plans are zero dollars a month it really helps them stay within a low monthly budget additionally for some people that are very healthy they rarely go to the doctor so they really are not seeing a lot of co-pays or co-insurance that they are responsible

for they feel that Medicare Advantage plans can really make sense for their lifestyle and so we get a lot of that feedback here in my office as well I found that most people that love their Medicare Advantage plan are people that are in generally good health and they live in a part of the country where their Medicare Advantage plan is widely accepted so they have a lot of doctors and hospitals in their Network to choose from

Negative Findings and Complaints

now in the Kaiser Family Foundation study where they're talking about traditional Medicare versus Medicare Advantage there were some areas in which traditional Medicare outperformed Medicare Advantage so

I want to talk about those as well if there were five studies specifically that found that Medicare Advantage enrollees were less likely than traditional Medicare beneficiaries to receive care from the highest rated hospitals overall or in the highest rated hospitals for Cancer Care or short stay skilled nursing facilities so Medicare

Advantage enrollees are less likely to go to the top tier hospitals the top-tier cancer institutes and the top tier skilled nursing care facilities when compared to people on traditional Medicare and this is likely because there are certain facilities like MD Anderson or Mayo Clinic that really don't accept Medicare Advantage plans so this is one area where traditional Medicare is outperforming

Medicare Advantage so you can see an example of a comment here on our screen that I got on on one of my videos recently and this is really one of the most common complaints one of the most common negative reviews that we see about Medicare Advantage has to do with the provider networks additionally another complaint or negative review that we tend to see on

Medicare Advantage plans is the need for prior authorization for certain services in general the reports state that Medicare Advantage plans tend to use prior authorization for relatively high cost services from beneficiaries that have certain medical needs and in general they found that Medicare Advantage plans can deny these

services at inappropriately High rates and this could be one of the reasons that the data shows that there is a higher disenrollment rate from Medicare Advantage among sicker Medicare Advantage enrollees so if you are debating between traditional Medicare and a Medicare Advantage plan there are several factors that you really want to keep in mind specifically you want to take into consideration

your budget and your health before you make this decision and one very important thing that many people do not realize is that there is not an annual open enrollment period for Medicare supplement plans or Medigap plans those are the plans that work with traditional Medicare and cover the 20 percent that traditional Medicare doesn't pay now if you are no longer new to Medicare then

typically those plans require medical underwriting meaning you have to health qualify uh for that plan so you could be denied based on your health unless you reside in a state that has certain guaranteed issue rules so that's a really common question that I get here in my office is about switching back and forth can I switch from traditional

Medicare to Medicare Advantage and back again yes you can but if you'd like to get a Medicare Supplement Plan the one that covers the 20 that traditional Medicare doesn't pay then you may have to pass through medical underwriting in the future in order to do that a lot of people don't realize that

Final Thoughts and Closing

so here in my office we work with both Medicare Advantage plans and Medicare supplement plans so I like to think we take a pretty unbiased view when it comes to helping you decide which type of plan is going to be best for your needs now and in the long term so we're

licensed in almost every state we help people all over the country to find the best type of Medicare plan for your needs and best of all our service is completely free of charge uh there is no fee to you to use our service at all and for more information on how Medicare agents actually get paid you can see a link in the video description below again our services free to use so you can call us anytime

thank you so much for watching please hit the like button if you liked this video subscribe to the channel if you haven't done so yet and definitely leave your comments below you can leave your reviews of your plan below I'd love to hear them maybe we'll use them in a future video thank you again so much for watching and we'll see you soon

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