How to Find a Medicare Drug Plan - DIY - Medicare Part D

when you come into Medicare one of the more overwhelming pieces of trying to figure out what you need is finding the right Medicare drug plan I hear it quite often that people just find it confusing on exactly how to get the right plan for the medications that they currently take so I'm going to show you right now how to do it yourself and where I feel it's absolutely the best way to do that because you really don't want somebody selling you a drug plan that might not be right for exactly the medications that you're taking so the great news is Medicare has a terrific site that really lets you do it yourself in a matter of minutes and I'm gonna go through that right now I'm Keith armbrick founder of Medicare on video and I help people across the country make the right Medicare choices and we walk you through step by step so right now we're going to walk through medicare's drug plan finder and I've made a URL to make it easy for you to get there if you go to www.drugplanfinder.com it's going to bring us right to the page on Medicare where we find our own drug plan and again drug plans are not like Medicare supplement plans so they are not standardized so they're different from insurance company to insurance company state to state ZIP code to zip code and there are literally hundreds of them and insurance agents generally do not have access to all the drug plans in your area so there may be one that they do not have access to that is the best for you so we want to do this regardless of whether we're using somebody to set it up for us or whether we're going to just do it ourselves I'm going to show you how easy it is to do it yourself so we get to medicare.gov and this guy looks a little familiar but we're going to put in a zip code first and makes it not complicated so I'm gonna use a zip code 29588 and then we click on select a plan type and what we're looking to do here is Part D drug plan and I'll give you a little word of caution it also talks about things like Medigap policies and Medicare Advantage plans here I don't find medicare.gov to have update information on these products so on drug plans absolutely but everything else I take with just a grain of salt because they show rates that aren't accurate they show plans that aren't available things of that nature so we're going to click on apply once we've chosen Part D drug plan and then we hit start and again really easy so we get to the next page and it's asking if you get help with your cost so if you are low income and you get help from whatever agency you may have something here but for the most part we're going to go with I don't get help and then we're going to click next and then this is where it's going to ask us to enter our drugs so whatever drugs you're taking have them with you or have them on a list and you simply start to type in and it will pull up that drug and you simply click on it and add it to the list so here I've already added a couple drugs one for thyroid one for blood pressure and kind of interesting you need to play around with this a little bit this drug here for thyroid significant difference in cost whether you take it by capsule or whether you take it by tablet I have no idea what but why it would be but it was a significant difference in cost so we went with tablet here and you can see it's 30 pills every month so once a day this one's 90 every month so it's three times a day and you just put in whatever it is you're taken and then once you have all your drugs listed in there you click on done adding drugs and it's going to bring you to a page where you choose your Pharmacy also important with the pharmacy because some may be in network on one plan there may not be a network for another plan so you want to compare that as you go and I'll show you exactly how easy that is right below it brings up a map of your area and the pharmacies in your area and you can see here you always want to choose mail order whether you use it or not it's a little bit cheaper a lot of people find it much more convenient as well just to use mail order and have the drugs delivered to you I also chose a Walgreens and a CVS and you'll see the difference here in just a minute but you can choose anything you know that's convenient for you and just makes it easy you can see when you choose it it puts them down here on this Bottom bar and then you click done and it's going to bring up our drug plans and the way that Medicare has set it up what we want to look at is not necessarily the lowest premium we want to look at the lowest total out-of-pocket costs including premium for the year and that is how we're so supporting it right off the bat lowest drug Plus premium cost that's going to give us our Apples to Apples preview of what plan is the best value and again can't be any easier than what we just did so you can see here right off the bat silverscript is five dollars and seventy cents per month in premium and total cost for the year is 116 dollars so that's including what you're going to pay for those two drugs every month plus the premium for the year 116 dollars out of pocket now something else to understand drug plans have gotten cheaper this five dollars and seventy cents a lot of plans like this one do not pay commissions to insurance agents so what that would do is if you were dealing with an insurance agent you would likely never see this plan so this plan is the best value in this ZIP code and likely would be the one to choose whether somebody is presenting it to you or not so again another great reason for us to do it ourselves so let's understand this a little bit better when we're looking at them when we go down here you just click on plan details and it's going to give you a complete breakdown of exactly what this plan is so it makes it just super easy to understand so again 5.70 your Retail Pharmacy cost is 48 dollars if you want to go mail order it's 46 dollars so again that's where it came up to that 116 dollars total out of pocket for the year you come down it shows you exactly what's going on now this is important we get down to the pharmacy so on this Silver Script plan CVS is preferred in network Walgreens is not so if you're going to choose this plan you're going to want to either use mail order or CVS if you absolutely have to use Walgreens you're going to want to pick a different plan so again it depends on your situation maybe one's easier to get into uh so forth and so on so it shows you the breakdown of cost so those two drugs do not apply to the deductible so there was a deductible I believe it was like five hundred dollars these are simply copay drugs so it's gonna be twenty four dollars for the year in copay and for the for both of them for blood pressure and then for the thyroid medication 48 total copay for the year plus that monthly premium is exactly how we got to that total out of pocket cost of 116 dollars just I mean super easy to do so if this is the right plan the one we want then we just simply click on enroll takes you right to that website you enroll in it and it'll be effective if you're doing it during open enrollment it's going to be effective on January 1st of next year if you're doing it when you come into Medicare it's going to be you want it to be effective on when your part B is going to start and your Medicare Supplement Plan is going to start so if for some reason that's CVS we just we can't have it we need something else then you go back to the list and again real easy you go to the next one down the line and you'll see the difference in cost so Silver Script on top the next one down is Cigna so the difference between these two yearly cost on that one's 116 dollars on this one's 150 so there wouldn't be any reason to pay the additional money unless that Pharmacy absolutely does not work for you and again there may have been some other pharmacies in that list that are also in network on this silverscript plan so that gives you pretty easy understanding on how to do this yourself and again I highly recommend that because it's just make sure you get what you're supposed to get and nobody sells you something that might not provide the best coverage for what you currently take so I hope you found this helpful and stay tuned I'll show you how to download my book makes Medicare easier as you go along and I hope you have a fantastic day thank you for taking the time to watch my video I hope you found it very helpful a couple of other things that you'll find very helpful is first download a copy of my free book Medicare made clear I put a lot of time a lot of effort into this book you'll find it very helpful for everything that you need for Medicare now and in the future it has videos in the book has all the links that you need for signing up and everything else that you'll need going forward so take just a minute go to medicareonvideo.com forward slash free book you can download it right now and save it on your computer you'll have it for now and in the future and then down the road when it's time to renew your Medicare Supplement Plan we always want to shop around so every year it makes sense to do a Medicare price check and I have a website specific to that www.medicarepricecheck.com where we will compare your current plan and see if we can get the same plan at a lower price and a lot of times we can do that so it makes sense to visit medicarepricecheck.com every year we'll do a quick comparison let you know if it makes sense and then we take it from there hope you found all this helpful have a fantastic day hey don't go anywhere these are some of my most recent videos right here you can also find the link right below this video to download my book Medicare made clear absolutely free you can also subscribe to my channel right here so please download my book watch some videos subscribe to the channel have a great day

Channel: Medicare on Video - HealthPlan65

Views: 28,297

Keywords: medicare drug plan, medicare part d, medicare part d enrollment, part d, medicare drug coverage, medicare drug plans, medicare part d explained, medicare part d donut hole, medicare plan finder, medicare part d premium, open enrollment

Id: _1MoCPKooSU

Length: 9min 57sec (597 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 02 2022