 Personal Finance PowerPoint Presentation. Medicare Advantage Plans. Prepare to get financially fit by practicing personal finance. Insurance is part of our long-term risk mitigation strategy where we follow the adage of measure twice cut once, putting a formal process in place, looking something like set the goals, develop a plan to reach them, put the plan in action, review the result, repeat the process periodically. Most of this information can be found at Investopedia Best Medical Advantage Plans, which you can find online. Take a look at the references, resources, continue your research from there. This is by Stephanie Travato, updated May 11, 2022. Note that we don't have any affiliation with any of the particular companies or insurance companies here. Investopedia may, but we're just trying to give an idea if you're looking into these options to get a place to start your research. So you can start your research by going to the Investopedia. If you so choose, look at the references, resources from there. Go to the particular companies themselves so you can start to be doing some comparison and doing your own research from that point. So best Medicare Advantage Plans. If you're joining the 18.4% of the U.S. population and rolled in Medicare, it can be overwhelming to figure out what coverage you need. That's for sure. Tell me about it. It's ridiculous, but we'll go through it here. We're getting through it. So if you want to simplify your Medicare Advantage and get it all in one package, you'll want to have a Medicare Advantage plan. So we talked about the different options that we can do, like the Medigap, Medicare, different kinds of Medicare. In prior presentations, we talked about insurance or medical insurance in general, some of the terminology and medical insurance, of course, applying over when you're thinking about the Medicare kind of stuff, as well as insurance concepts in general. And now we're thinking about this in alignment with the actual companies for, in this case, specifically Medicare Advantage. So it offers all the coverage of original Medicare with extra benefits such as dental coverage, vision coverage, and often coverage for a gym membership. Wow. A gym membership. Well, I'm sold. Sold. Costs vary depending on coverage. And choosing a Medicare Advantage plan requires careful consideration. The average monthly cost of a Medicare Advantage plan in 2022 is $19, much lower than $170 for the original Medicare Part B. I note that you will still be responsible for your Medicare premium, even with a Medicare Advantage plan. When it comes to Medicare Advantage plans, the choices keep growing. So research the best companies that offer, and this being Investopedia, doing the research here we're looking at their work, best companies that offer Medicare Advantage plans based on price, areas of service, companies that serve at least 40 states, health plan quality, availability of educational content, and accessibility of the website so you can get the best insurance quickly and efficiently. That sounds great. So once again, we'll go through the list here, and then you want to do your own research from there. We'll talk a little bit about a couple of the high performers with a top view on the list, and then you can continue doing more research on the references at Investopedia if you would so choose, or go to the websites themselves for the particular companies. So the best Medicare Advantage plans for 2022 according to Investopedia, best user quality, they're saying SIGNA, and then we got the best for experience, best user experience, Humano, best in educational content, Aetna, best for bonuses, that's the AARP, the ARP best for simplicity and clarity, Blue Cross, Blue Shield. Let's go over, we'll just go over a couple of them. And again, you can take a look at the list and these companies yourself and do some more research, but just to get an idea of a couple of them. SIGNA, SIGNA Medicare Advantage plans earned an average of 3.88 out of five stars from the CMS in 2021. That's not bad. I'd like it to be over the forward threshold personally, but okay, on this standard measure of Medicare Advantage quality, SIGNA scores better than other large national users. Well, that's good. The pros, I think it's a five, yeah, it's a five star point scale. So in the case pros, highly rated plans, several types of special needs plans, member services available online or via my SIGNA app. So you got the app, oh, there it is. They have an app sold. The app is available. All old people like squinting on their phones. 24 seven access to the telehealth, lots of extra benefits. What are the cons? Despite a beating other large plans for quality, there are higher rated, smaller plans. So you see the ratings have been higher on some of the other plans possibly. SIGNA sometimes called SIGNA Health Spring for Medicare Advantage plans earns higher average star ratings from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the CMS, the agency that covers Medicare. Out of five star SIGNA plans, average 3.88 higher than other large national Medicare Advantage insurers. That said, there are plans with smaller geographic coverage areas that rate higher. So you got to kind of take that into consideration. Obviously, if you're on the larger plan, is that going to be, and you have more people, is that going to be a bigger benefit or not depending on the star rating, a smaller plan that has more people? That means that everybody that is doing the rating has more influence for each rating than if you have more people in it. So you can kind of think about what would be the pros and cons and the rating system there. But SIGNA offers a wide variety of Medicare Advantage plans including three types of special needs plans for people with more complex health needs. It also received an A for financial strength from the AM Best. It offers 24-7 telehealth services so you can go right online and talk to someone over the internet 24-7. Robust online member service capabilities and the My SIGNA app. There it is. That's all you have to say. You just put that up front and then done. It's got an app. Sweet. SIGNA extra benefits are extensive. In addition to dental, vision, hearing and fitness, it offers some members help with transportation over-the-counter allowances, home delivery meals, health and wellness discounts, and a program to help people find assistance pain for essential needs like housing, food and prescriptions. However, all these benefits may come at a cost. I knew they would. They always do as SIGNA can be pricey. Though many of its plans have no or low premiums or deductibles with higher out-of-pocket maximums, averaging nearly $6,000, you might pay more if you needed a lot of health services or less if you don't. Then we've got Humana. Humana's website is clear, clean and simple. We like that straight to the clear, clean and simple. It's easy to navigate and get clear pricing estimate without entering personal information other than your zip code. So you just enter your zip code and then it knows everything about you. The internet mind just says, I know where this person was born and what his favorite ice cream is or something. In any case, but that's helpful when you're trying to get an insurance plan, although it's kind of creepy otherwise. But in any case, the pros, it's simple, straightforward website, clear pricing, easy plan comparison, ability to get estimates without having to enter personal information. On the cons side of things, there's relatively limited educational information available on the website. So it's clean, it tells you where to go, but it doesn't tell you why you're going there, possibly. I'd like to get some more detail on that. That is a con. So unable to make payment via an app? Oh, are you kidding me? I can't pay over my phone? That might not be a big thing for a lot of older people, I would think. But several different types of plans, they got the HMO, the PPO, et cetera, can be overwhelming. Obviously, it can be overwhelming. Humana has an A minus raking from the AM, best indicating its strong financial state. We chose Humana for the best user experience because when you compare plans, Humana allows you to choose what kinds of plan you want to see, whether it's medical coverage, only prescription drugs only, or a plan that includes both. Though that's nice. So in spite of that, you can select the type of plan, the HMOs, which often are offered without a premium, but apply only for in-network providers. So we talked about that in our overall insurance discussion versus the PPO's or the private fee for service plans that offer in and out of network coverage, but with higher costs or the option to see all plans you qualify for. The process is streamlined and straightforward, given you the choice to enter your doctor's name or prescription medication information to get an accurate estimate all without having to register for an account, wait for an email, or input a lot of personal information. So they're just really impressed with the website over there. They've got some good web developers. That is nice. Humana provides recommended plans based on your situation, including listing coverage, premium specialists, and prescription costs. So we're not going to go over all the rest of them, so we just went over a couple of them. You can take a look at the rest of the list at Investopedia and use the references, go to the actual websites for them, do some comparison shopping just to get off on some research.