A data-sharing arrangement that quietly decides who keeps a valuable Medicare subsidy, and who loses it, is about to restart. Starting September 16, 2026, the Social Security Administration will compare civil service pension records from the Office of Personnel Management against its own Medicare files to check who is correctly receiving Extra Help with prescription…

Starting July 1, 2026, Medicare began covering three specific weight-loss and metabolic drugs through a new program called Medicare GLP-1 Bridge, priced at a single flat monthly amount no matter what a beneficiary earns. It is not a blanket expansion of GLP-1 coverage to every Medicare enrollee who wants a prescription — it is a…

Medicare’s second round of drug price negotiations is now locked in, and the timeline is easy to blur with a newer, separate round that just started. The federal government finished bargaining with manufacturers over 15 widely prescribed drugs months ago, and those negotiated prices take effect for Medicare Part D and Part B plans on…

Every Medicare Advantage and Part D enrollee should expect a notice in the mail this month that quietly does more to shape next year’s coverage than almost anything else Medicare sends out. It’s the Annual Notice of Change, and it lands just ahead of the one Medicare deadline that actually forces a decision: whether to…

A federal program built to keep Medicare drug plan premiums from swinging wildly is being shut down, and CMS made the announcement in the same release where it published a 2027 figure that’s easy to mistake for an actual bill. The program is the Part D Premium Stabilization Demonstration; the figure is the $41.33 “base…

Becker’s Hospital Review counted 29 health systems that have dropped or are set to drop Medicare Advantage contracts in 2026, an update the trade publication posted on September 4. The number matters less as a single statistic than as a signal: providers and insurers are still fighting over Medicare Advantage terms well into the year,…

On July 28, 2026, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services made two announcements at once: the technical numbers that will set every 2027 Medicare Part D premium, and the end of a subsidy that has quietly held those premiums down for the past two years. The subsidy went to insurers running stand-alone prescription drug…

A retiree filling a shingles vaccine prescription in January might expect to pay full price until a fresh annual deductible is met. That is not how Medicare Part D actually works. Since January 2023, the program’s yearly drug deductible has skipped over two specific categories of medication entirely, and CMS has just finished writing that…

Millions of Medicare Advantage enrollees now get a plastic debit card loaded with an allowance for things like groceries, over-the-counter items, or utility bills, part of the supplemental benefits plans use to compete for members. Those cards have also become a magnet for confusion and, according to federal regulators, outright misuse. Starting in 2027, Medicare…

If you take prescription drugs on Medicare, you may already have noticed that the dreaded “donut hole,” the coverage gap where your costs used to jump, has quietly stopped hitting your wallet the way it once did. That’s not an accident, and it isn’t going away. Starting with the plan year that opens January 1,…