Medicare Advantage members don’t usually think about their Part B premium until the amount landing in their bank account changes. For millions of enrollees, a plan perk called a giveback benefit quietly covers part of that premium, which is why losing it shows up as a smaller Social Security deposit rather than a canceled service.…

Every dollar figure on Medicare.gov’s cost pages is still labeled for 2026, and Medicare’s annual Open Enrollment period is a little over a month away. That gap isn’t a website that forgot to update — it’s how the Medicare pricing calendar normally works, even in a year when part of next year’s numbers are already…

Medicare Advantage members who lose their plan at the end of the year don’t all get the same amount of time to find a new one. How long the switching window lasts depends entirely on why the plan is disappearing, and the rules sit in one place on Medicare’s own site that most people never…

Medicare Part D isn’t supposed to pay for drugs a person could just pick up off a store shelf. Federal auditors found that for three straight years, Part D plans kept paying pharmacies for five drugs long after their brand-name versions had switched from prescription-only to over-the-counter, and nothing in the system was set up…

Medicare pays transplant hospitals for the cost of removing and shipping a donor organ, but federal law limits that reimbursement to organs that are actually used in a transplant covered by Medicare. A federal watchdog just found that limit wasn’t enforced for six years running. The Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector…

Medicare’s drug price negotiation program picked its next round of targets in January, and the numbers attached to that list are large by any measure: 15 medications that about 1.8 million people relied on between November 2024 and October 2025, at a combined cost of roughly $27 billion to Medicare Part B and Part D.…

Millions of workers and retirees get their prescription help through a health reimbursement arrangement, a flexible spending account or a health savings account instead of a standalone drug plan. For years, the employer or plan administrator behind that account had to send a yearly notice stating whether the coverage was as good as Medicare’s own…

Insurance agents selling Medicare Advantage and Part D plans are about to get a lot more room to work. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services finalized a rule this spring that strips out several of the waiting periods and buffers that used to slow down how licensed agents and brokers reach Medicare beneficiaries. For…

Millions of Medicare Advantage members carry a prepaid debit card loaded with an allowance for groceries, over-the-counter items, dental work or utility bills, and plenty of them have learned to let a little money sit unused in case they need it later. A rule the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services finished this year closes…

A Medicare Advantage plan does not have to fail for a member to lose it. Medicare can decline to renew a plan’s contract, terminate the contract outright, or reach a mutual agreement with the insurer to end it, and any of those three paths produces the same kind of letter in the mailbox. Members who…