Three Words, One Circus; Medicare Open Enrollment.

Three words, one circus; Medicare open enrollment. On the surface, the goal seems simple enough: provide health care services for senior citizens and those who are permanently disabled. Subcutaneous exploration reveals a dark labyrinth of confusion, full of dubious pitfalls and misinformation, with little explanation for those who take time to seek it. Every year most Americans go shopping for health insurance, they call it open enrollment, and for working people who receive benefits through their employer based plans, a lot of the shopping has already been done. Still, many people find it very confusing and difficult to think through the limited amount of decision making they are left to make. Seniors have it worse; they don’t have a human resource department with trained people to make decisions; they have to do it all themselves. Making it worse, insurance companies that provide medicare benefits have to market their products to individuals like any other product, sell sell sell. Now, if seniors were well informed and companies always acted with integrity the environment might not be as threatening, but the current system has created exactly the opposite situation, and plenty of companies try to take advantage of trusting, ill informed Medicare enrollees.

Over time, many managed care organizations have carved out specific benefits to other organizations. For instance, most people have a vision plan, a dental plan, etc. Medicare is no different. The one benefit that has been carved out but is just a little different in nature than the others is the pharmacy benefit. The dental plan wants you to have great teeth, the vision plan wants your eyes to be fine. It’s in their best…