Medicare Part A covers inpatient hospital stays, skilled nursing facility care after a qualifying hospital stay, some home health services, and hospice care. It generally does not cover doctor visits, outpatient care, or prescription drugs.
Part A is often called hospital insurance, and that's a fair description. It covers the cost of being admitted to a hospital as an inpatient, meaning you've been formally admitted by a doctor, not just kept for observation. This distinction matters because observation stays are billed differently and may not trigger Part A coverage. Part A also covers short-term care in a skilled nursing facility, but only after a qualifying hospital stay of at least three days, and only for skilled services like physical therapy or wound care, not just help with daily activities. Home health care is covered in limited circumstances, mainly when you're homebound and need skilled nursing or therapy. Hospice care for people with a terminal illness is also covered under Part A. Most people don't pay a premium for Part A if they or their spouse worked and paid Medicare taxes for at least 10 years. However, there are still cost-sharing expenses, including a deductible for each benefit period and daily coinsurance for longer hospital stays. These amounts change each year, so it's worth checking current figures at medicare.gov or with a licensed agent.
For you, this means Part A has you covered for serious hospital events, but it won't help with regular doctor visits or prescriptions, so most people need additional coverage through Part B, a Medigap plan, or a Medicare Advantage plan to fill those gaps.
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: