Original Medicare (Parts A and B) does not cover routine dental, vision, or hearing care. Some Medicare Advantage plans include these benefits, but coverage varies widely by plan.
This is one of the biggest surprises for people new to Medicare. Original Medicare, meaning the federal Part A and Part B program, was designed around hospital and medical care. It does not pay for routine dental cleanings, fillings, or dentures. It does not cover eye exams for glasses or the glasses themselves. And it generally does not cover hearing exams or hearing aids. There are narrow exceptions. Medicare will cover certain dental work that is medically necessary before a heart procedure, for example, or an eye exam if you have diabetes-related eye disease. But day-to-day dental, vision, and hearing care? That falls outside the traditional program. This is where Medicare Advantage plans come in. Many of these plans, offered by private insurers, bundle in some level of dental, vision, and hearing benefits. The catch is that coverage varies a lot from plan to plan and year to year. One plan might cover two cleanings a year and a modest allowance for hearing aids. Another might offer very little. You need to read the plan details carefully before enrolling, and verify current benefits directly with the plan, since they can change annually.
In Utah, carriers like SelectHealth, Humana, and UHC offer Medicare Advantage plans that include varying dental, vision, and hearing benefits. If you live in a rural county like Garfield or Kane, your plan choices may be more limited, so it is worth checking what is actually available in your zip code.
For you, this means if dental, vision, or hearing coverage matters, Original Medicare alone will not provide it, and you will need to either choose a Medicare Advantage plan that includes those benefits or purchase separate supplemental coverage.
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: