Each year, review your drug formulary, provider network, plan premiums and cost-sharing, and any changes to benefits so you are not caught off guard by costs or coverage gaps.
Medicare is not a set-it-and-forget-it program. Plans change every January 1, and your health and finances change too. A yearly review takes maybe an hour and can save you real money and frustration.Start with your medications. Drug formularies, which are the lists of what a plan covers and at what cost, get updated annually. A drug you take every day could move to a higher cost tier or get dropped entirely. Run your current medications through the Medicare Plan Finder at Medicare.gov each fall to see if your plan is still competitive.Check your provider network. Doctors, specialists, and hospitals can leave or join networks from year to year. If you had a procedure and found a surgeon you trust, confirm that person is still in-network before January.Look at your premium, deductible, and copays for the services you actually use. Focus on the out-of-pocket maximum too. That is the most you would pay in a year for covered services, and it varies widely between plans.If your health situation changed this year, a plan that was fine when you were healthy may not serve you as well if you are managing a new diagnosis or need more specialist visits.Finally, check your income. If your income dropped, you may now qualify for help with Medicare costs that you did not qualify for before. Extra Help is a federal program that reduces drug costs, and the Medicare Savings Program can help with premiums and other expenses for those who qualify.
Utah's Medicare Savings Program can help qualifying residents with Part B premiums and other cost-sharing. If your income or household situation changed, it is worth checking eligibility each year through Utah's Department of Health and Human Services.
For you, this means treating Medicare like a lease that renews every January, worth a quick annual review to make sure you are still getting what you need at a cost that makes sense.
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: