The biggest mistake is choosing a plan based on premium alone, without checking whether your doctors are covered, what your prescriptions will cost, and what you'd owe in a serious medical situation.
Most people turning 65 are used to picking employer health insurance where the plan options are pre-vetted and the differences between them are minor. Medicare is different. The range of what plans cover, what they cost, and which providers they include is genuinely wide. And the stakes are higher because you're often making this decision at an age when you might actually need significant care. The most common mistake is fixating on the monthly premium. Someone picks a $0 Advantage plan, feels good about saving money, and then discovers their cardiologist isn't in the network, or their expensive maintenance medication has a high tier cost under that plan's drug formulary. By the time they realize the mismatch, they may have to wait until the next open enrollment period to change, which could be months away. The second most common mistake is not reviewing the plan annually. Medicare plans can change their premiums, their drug formularies, and their provider networks every January. What fit you perfectly last year may not fit you this year. Every fall, during the Annual Enrollment Period from October 15 to December 7, it's worth spending an hour checking whether your plan still covers your doctors and your medications at a reasonable cost.
For you, this means the premium is just one number in a bigger equation, and spending a little time each fall reviewing your coverage can prevent a costly surprise when you actually need care.
Our Commitment to Reliable Medicare Information
At Resting Sycamore Advisors, we work to provide accurate, current, and trustworthy information about Medicare Advantage, Medicare Part D, and Special Needs Plans.
To do that, we use data published by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), which is the official source for Medicare plan and enrollment information.
Our Medicare plan pages and comparison tools are powered by CMS datasets, including:
When possible, we link to the original CMS resources so you can review the source material directly.
We follow the CMS release schedule and update our website as new data becomes available.
We load new plan year Landscape and PBP files before the Medicare Annual Enrollment Period (October 15 through December 7). We also monitor CMS.gov for updates or revisions and refresh our content when needed.
We update enrollment and performance data as CMS publishes revised files, which are typically released monthly or quarterly.
We routinely monitor CMS announcements for corrections, reissued files, or other changes and update our pages accordingly.
Each plan page includes a Last Accessed date so visitors can see when the source information was most recently reviewed.
CMS data can be difficult to read in raw form. To make it easier to use, we format and organize the data for clarity.
This includes:
All data values come from CMS. We do not change the underlying values beyond formatting, organization, and presentation.
We keep internal records of the CMS dataset versions used on our site.
If CMS issues corrected or revised files, we update our website to reflect the latest available version.
Please keep the following in mind:
For personalized Medicare assistance, please use these official resources: