Medicare Supplement Plan G

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This is the Truth Network. Welcome to Finishing Well brought to you by CardinalGuide.com, with certified financial planner Hans Scheil, best-selling author and financial planner helping families finish well for over 40 years. On Finishing Well, we'll examine both biblical and practical knowledge to assist families in finishing well, including discussions on managing Social Security, Medicare, IRAs, long-term care, life insurance, investments, and taxes.

Now, let's get started with Finishing Well. So today on Finishing Well, our show, certified financial planner Hans Scheil is Medicare Supplement Plan G. Don't miss the Plan G part. Hans does these beautiful videos on YouTube, which by the way, you ought to subscribe to, and he did this on Medicare Plan G. And as I thought about it, I couldn't help but think that Moses was very familiar with Medicare Supplement Plan G, or he was actually just really very understood Plan G, period, meaning God. And so the Jews have this wonderful commentator that they have studied for years and years.

It's kind of like their Matthew Henry, if you like Bible commentators, and this guy's name was Rashi. And I love what he wrote on the passage in Exodus when, you know, Moses meets God at the burning bush, and God says to Moses, you know, you're going to go set my people free. And Moses is a little, you know, this would be a little bit scary to you to go set these people free if God said that to you. And so God, you know, Moses says to God, you know, who should I say sent me?

And you may be familiar with the statement that God says I am that I am right there. But what Rashi said about that was, there was a question underneath Moses's question, which you can't help but wonder if you were Moses, and you knew these people, the real question is, God, where have you been for the last 400 years? And what God was telling Moses was actually, Moses, you need to know about Plan G. We don't really understand why they had to lose their first, you know, children into the Nile, and we don't understand why the slave masters had to beat them.

But God had some plan for the people of Israel that he would bring them to the point where they would be able to receive his law and receive his commandments and be able to be the lineage of Christ. And so there's things he knew that, but what God was actually telling Moses is, I was there. I was there with every baby that was thrown into the Nile.

I was actually there when the slave drivers were beating. I've been there. I am the most reality you have ever experienced.

You didn't think I was there, but actually I'm the realist thing that there possibly is. And so he was involved in every little detail. Well, the neat thing is, because I actually have a Medicare Plan G, is, you know, from my perspective, like God was saying, he was in there like Prego spaghetti sauce. I was there. And so with Plan G, as you think about the things you need for your healthcare, because when I was a kid, you know, my father had Blue Cross Blue Shield.

He worked for General Motors. And if we were sick, there was no such thing as it, you know, any kind of copay or 80-20 or, you know, we went to the doctor, it got paid, and my parents never worried a thing about it. I mean, that was insurance from my standpoint.

Sure. Well, this year is my first year on Plan G. And so as we get into the details of Plan G, but my perspective is, it's in there like Prego spaghetti sauce. Like, oh, that's covered, my wife thinks I'm a genius. She said, you went to the emergency room and you didn't pay? No, nothing.

You went to the doctor and there was no, nothing. I was like, man, so we're going to get in that today. Tell them who your insurance agent is that sold you that Plan G. Oh, that would be Hans Schott. But, you know, we talked about it and I was like, well, Hans, what would you get if you went on Medicare and he was just pretty simple. There's a lot of them out there, but Plan G is the one.

Sure. And we wanted to talk about today, if you really want the best and you want to be covered in the most way, you don't want to have to mess with networks. A lot of people love networks when they're just getting routine care or they got a little problem that comes up and, you know, it's actually nice to have a little book that you can pick out a specialist to go see.

But when people start having trouble with networks is when they get seriously sick and now they want to go see a particular specialist, like the example we were just talking about. Imagine, Roger, most of what you've had has been in the manageable realm, but if you all of a sudden had cancer again, my wife just went through that at Duke and you're liable to call me up and say, you know what, how do I get into that Duke Cancer Center and then we don't have to look at your Medicare insurance or your insurance period. Whereas somebody that's not on a Medicare, they're not on original Medicare, they've gone with a Medicare Advantage plan. There are Medicare Advantage plans that have these specialists on there, but that's just one less thing that you don't have to worry about. With the original Medicare and then if you purchase the Plan G Medicare supplement, you're not even going to have to worry about bills when you go there.

It's pretty cool. Yeah, there's a deductible at the beginning of the year, you have to pay for that. Okay, so the only deductible or copayment that Plan G does not pay is that $203, that's what it is in 2021. It's the first $203 of Medicare approved charges that are outpatient, they're on you. Okay, the old Plan F, which is still there for some people that went on Medicare before, we had a lot of them in force, people that have just hung on to them, that actually pays the $203. But the government took care of that, they won't let us sell insurance to you now or to people on it 2020 and after that covers that $203. The government wants you to incur at least some expense as a deterrent, I guess, to go into the doctor or something.

But after that, you haven't paid a dime. No, and what's crazy from my perspective is, you know, last year I had a $5,000 deductible. If I'd gone into the hospital for any reason, I had all the kinds of copays and I don't even want to know all the other things that I had to pay, but I never got sick for a few years. Well, this year, you know, as I went on Medicare, the very month I went on Medicare happens to be the month I almost chopped my thumb off with my, you know, hedge trimmer. And that led to an infection, which, you know, ended up with all kinds of scan and other hospitalization. And that's why I was telling you, my wife thinks I'm a genius. I had some stomach problems that led to a bunch of other tests.

And again, my wife's like, what the heck? And then I got COVID. And when I got COVID, I had trouble with my blood pressure, which I'm actually still having. And boom, two more trips to the emergency room. And if you go to the emergency room, right, and you're just on plain Medicare, the doctor was in it like $1,484?

Well, no, that's an inpatient hospital. So under part A, if you go in the hospital and you're there overnight and you have original Medicare and you got no supplement or you have the wrong supplement, you have a deductible of $1,484. And that's not an annual deductible. That's a per hospital stay. So if you have something early in the year and you're in the hospital and then later in the year, you go back in, whether it's the same thing or not, you got another $1,484.

The good news is the plan G pays all that. Now, what you were talking about under original Medicare part B, you're responsible for 20% of all your charges after that $203 deductible. So if we just took a wild guess that maybe your part B expenses have been $20,000 this year, had you not had good Medicare supplement coverage, you would have been on the hook for about 20% of that or $4,000. Well, if it had been last year, you know, before I got on Medicare to be in with, you know, it'd been over $10,000 that I would be, you know, over the two years because I'd had a $5,000 deductible. I had a $5,000 deductible this year. So I'm like, yay, Medicare, number one, you know, but number two, yay, plan G because, oh, my goodness, I mean, the money that it saved me this year, but, you know, the thing that just tickled me to death that I found out today that I didn't know.

I was like, Hans, I'm worried that, man, when they come up to renew my policy this year, they're going to go, this guy cost us $14. They can't do that. But I found out they don't rate it based on, it's not like car insurance. No, it absolutely isn't.

They can't do that. So they can raise your premium based upon the claims of all the people in North Carolina that have plan G and how they've used it. So, again, that stuff averages out. So that's just one more thing you don't need to worry about. That's what I like about plan G, which I've always thought about when it comes to God, right? There's a lot of things I don't understand in this world, but plan G says, don't worry about it.

You're covered. So, you know, the plan G has a whole list of benefits that it has over the other plans. So, you know, why did they call it G? I mean, why is the plan G? The plan G is just one option of 10. So there's 10 plans that you could choose from. They're called A, plan A, plan B. Guess what comes after plan B?

C? You have plan C, plan D. And so the government just came out with, you insurance companies, they did this 30 years ago, there are 10 plans you can sell. And this is exactly what they're going to pay in benefits. You can only sell, you can sell all 10 of them.

You can sell three of them. You know, so the insurance companies have the policies written for them, and they're exactly the same from company to company. The government did this to stop us insurance agents from going out and showing people and saying, my plan's better than that plan. And so it's changed to it.

So they wanted to make it less confusing for seniors. And they've really done that because we can talk about plan G. And plan G is the best one that's available right now. We can talk about that. And that plan G is exactly the same no matter who you buy it from. There's 40 different companies in North Carolina offering plan G. They all charge different prices, but the benefits on those from the 40 different companies are exactly the same. Right.

So my happens to be through mutual go along, right? But if I had the one through Edna, I had it from wherever, I'd had exactly the same coverage. I just paid a different premium. And you would have called a different number when you want to ask them questions.

That's it. It's exactly the same. And that's true like if you went to a plan B. The plan B is exactly the same through all 40 companies. So what we're talking about today is if you buy this stuff the right way and you're going to go this route and you're going to stay on original Medicare and then you're going to buy a supplement. I'm going to just try to simplify this and we're going to talk about the benefits of a plan G in the second part of the show. That's what you ought to buy. And you can say, well, it's the most expensive because it's the best, but it actually, we can quote you the prices from all 40 companies and we can pick amongst the ones that are the least.

Right. With the best companies, which it was not, I mean, from my perspective, nowhere close to the insurance I was paying with a $5,000 deductible. That's the part that's like, what, how could I pay this for this compared to, you know, so Medicare, we got a lot to talk about and you're going to be glad you tuned in today. So this show was brought to you by cardinalguide.com and certainly Hans' book, The Complete Cardinal Guide to Planning for and Living in Retirement. The section today on Medicare has all sorts of things because you're like, there's a lot of confusing stuff in this alphabet soup. But today we're talking about Medicare supplements and we're going to be doing a lot more of that.

So stay tuned. Hans and I would love to take our show on the road to your church, Sunday school, Christian or civic room. Here's a chance for you to advance the kingdom through financial resources by leveraging Hans' expertise in qualified charitable contributions, veterans aid and attendance, IRAs, Social Security, Medicare and long-term care. Just go to cardinalguide.com and contact Hans to schedule a live recording of Finishing Well at your church, Sunday school, Christian or civic group. Contact Hans at cardinalguide.com.

That's cardinalguide.com. Welcome back to Finishing Well with certified financial planner Hans Scheil. Today we're talking about Medicare Supplement Plan G. So coincidentally, it's just like we talked about. It's like God. It's in there.

It's part of the deal. Okay, so the Plan G pays the most benefits. It has the most benefits and effectively it's the best plan to buy that's on the market right now and that's why I sold it to you. Now understand, you do have the option of going on a Medicare Advantage plan and privatizing, getting a private insurance company and so we're not talking about that today. Many of these Medicare Advantage plans, you don't have to pay a premium for them because essentially Medicare pays your premium for you so there's zero premium. And what we're talking about today is a G plan Medicare Supplement and you got to pay a premium for this or you choose to pay a premium.

And if you want the best, this is clearly the best route to go and then when you're buying a Medicare Supplement, that's what you want to buy as the Plan G. And why you want to buy the Plan G is it has the most benefits. We can start with the fact that after that $203 annual deductible that none of the plans cover that are currently available, after that Medicare is going to pay 80% of their approved charges. You would be responsible for 20% and the 20% that you would be responsible for is paid in full by the Plan G and many of the other plans pay the 20% in full as well. That was the part that was the scariest to me like wow, somebody's out there buying a Medicare Supplement and they're paying a premium for it. In other words, they're making monthly payments and then all of a sudden they go into the hospital and say it was a $10,000 bill, well there's $2,000 that they're going to pay on top of there. If you have something other than the Plan G like a Plan N or a Plan D that somebody sold you, I'm not so much saying they're inferior but they're missing some benefits.

If they're not a Plan G and there's something other than that, you're missing something and I could actually show you that if we break it down. What I want to talk about is it's this 20% liability that is the reason, first of all, that you want a Medicare Supplement because if you had huge bills, you can't stomach 20% of a huge bill. So the supplement's going to come in and take care of that but there's a little piece of that that people miss that the Plan G covers, the other ones don't and it's called excess charges.

Do you know anything about excess charges? I do. Okay. So some doctors aren't Medicare friendly. Yeah, they're not Medicare, they don't take assignment of Medicare.

Right. They take Medicare but they don't accept assignment. In other words, they can work off a different pricing schedule or they can do this balance billing. If they do that, let's just make this simple, the Plan B picks up the excess charge.

So that's a benefit and that's lacking on some of these other plans. You mean the Plan G? The Plan G. Yeah, the Plan G, you said B, it's okay.

I said B. Yeah, you did. I thought you were thinking about Medicare Part B. Yeah, okay. So the Plan G pays not only the 20% but the amount over 100% of the excess charges, they pay those in full. Right.

Okay, pretty awesome. It also has a foreign travel emergency benefit which, you know, if you never leave the country and you don't ever foresee yourself leaving the country, well then I guess this doesn't matter to you. And a lot of sales people have made that decision for you when they're selling you some other plan. But the foreign travel emergency is a benefit that comes with the Plan G because Medicare doesn't cover care outside of the United States.

I don't know if you know that. Yeah, like if you go on a cruise to the Bahamas or I went on my mission trip to Jamaica and I'd end up in the hospital, Medicare is not there. So there's this foreign travel emergency benefit that comes with the Plan G that can be extremely valuable.

That's really about it. I mean there's a couple of extra benefits and then the whole rest of the thing, it just picks up all your deductibles that are not covered by Medicare and people experience it just like you have. We have clients that bought from us back in like 2013, 2014. They bought either a Plan F or a Plan G and we've contacted them since then. And we've said like in 2017, 2018, 2019 and we've said, hey, that Plan G that we sold you or that Plan F has gotten up there in price and we've got this other company. We can come in with a new company and we can cut your price by 50 bucks a month.

A lot of them don't believe us. You need to tell me I can get exactly the same thing from a different company and yet I'm going to pay less? That's exactly what I'm telling you because a Plan G is a Plan G is a Plan G and we've had many of those people just turn us down. They're our own customers so they're willing to pay more than they have to because they're in love with these things.

And that's actually become a problem. I'm calling some of these people myself because I am just thanking them for being a customer for seven or eight years. But it's like, hey, you're paying 250 bucks a month now for this thing and you can buy this from Company B or Company C through us, same place. We just fill out a form and we're going to cut your premium. And some of them, they're listening to me actually.

They're now moving it. So yeah, when I look at your chart, which you did on this video, it says that Aetna right there is $118 for a Plan G right now? That's correct, for a 70-year-old male non-smoker who's single, who lives alone.

That's a deal. Yeah, well it is, especially when you look down the chart and you see that Cigna is charging $155 for exactly the same thing. But these people that bought Cigna in 2014, they did that under a different wrapper. They're the ones paying $200 and some dollars a month. So there's a little bit of a shell game that goes on within this stuff.

I'm not going to get into it on this show. But we turn that to our own customers' favor because we move these people every two to three, four years if we can. And we'll do that to you, is that like in year three or year four, if your health is such that you can move and we're going to look at it every year. And when there's somebody that offers a significant discount to the Mutual of Omaha plan that you have, guess what?

We're going to move you. I mean it ain't much more complicated than that, is that if you're willing to pay for it, because you've got to pay this premium, even $118 a month or more in different states and for older people. I mean these can get up to $200, $300 a month, so as long as you're willing to stomach that, you've just got much better coverage and you've got freedom of choice of your doctors and hospitals.

It's a wonderful thing. Now what we also said on the video is you need to purchase, in addition to this, a separate Part D drug plan. And you did that as well, right? Yeah, exactly.

And I don't even remember who you have it with. Well first or something? Well care.

Well care. It's like $18 a month or something. And we got like 20 choices of those, 20 different plans. And what you did with that one was somebody asked me what all my medications were that I took, and you compared those to other plans to see which one works best that you cover the most on. And you look at that versus the premiums of those things, but yeah. So you're paying $20 a month for that, and that covers your drugs and does a lot of other things.

And then we can evaluate that every year, because if somebody's offering a better deal come this fall, we spend the whole fall moving people that need to be moved. So one of the things that to me I would have been totally unaware of, that many of the people selling this stuff, they only represent one company. So if there was say Aetna, and they worked for Aetna, and Aetna's plan goes up to whatever, they only have the choice of selling that.

And so when somebody looks at their Medicare supplements, it's helpful to obviously deal with an independent agent who can see all the different prices. Well absolutely, and that's just from the old, there was a day when I only represented one company, everybody, that's the old way of doing things. But now with the internet, and these companies make us incur all the expenses for marketing the business, there's really no reason to just work for one company, especially if you're in this business.

So what we try to do at Cardinal is we represent just about everybody. The only people we don't represent are the one companies that won't let us represent them. Like Mutual of Omaha, they have their one company people, but they will let, and most of their business comes from brokers. But we really have very little loyalty to them, and Aetna and everybody else. We spreadsheet this stuff, so we take all this business and we turn it around on the companies and say we're only going to put our customers with you if you've got competitive pricing, and if you offer good service and fair underwriting and all that kind of stuff. But a lot of it has to do with the pricing, because they're all selling exactly the same thing. Right, and when you've got big name companies like Aetna or Mutual of Omaha, it isn't like, you know, you're... We've got them all, and we've got some companies you've never heard of that we put people with. For various reasons, sometimes it's price, and they all have different underwriting standards.

So sometimes we have somebody that wants to get out of their old plan G, and they want to get a new plan G, but one of those companies with the names won't take them because of their illnesses. Then we're going to go over to this company you've never heard of, but we've heard of them. We've checked them all out and do business with them. They will take you, so then we're going to put you there.

Right, and there you go. That's the advantage of, again, dealing with somebody who is obviously looking at the business holistically and as a fiduciary and a CFP, you know, is out there. We get so few complaints about coverage. I mean, you just think if you're in the insurance business and you've got 5,000 customers or 5,000 Medicare Supplement customers spread all over the country, you would think that some people would be calling in regularly not happy with something that's going on, and it's almost nonexistent on these plan G Medicare Supplements because people understand what they have.

They learn it just the way you learned it. They expect to owe nothing. We don't even get them calling in and complaining about premium increases.

And I'm just, this is an unscientific study, but I'm always asking my people, I want to know about it if this stuff isn't working the way we're telling everybody, and it just doesn't go on. It automatics claims filing, so you never have to file a claim with Mutual of Omaha. You just show them your Medicare card, you show them the Mutual of Omaha, but they have to file with Medicare. And then Medicare automatically knows that you have Mutual of Omaha, and they automatically send it over by computer, and then Mutual of Omaha just pays the doctor.

I mean, it's just, it's automatic. Again, I know what we're talking about today is a little more advanced than we normally talk about what is Medicare, what is Part A, Part B. But today we've been talking about Medicare Supplements for people that aren't on Medicare Advantage but are on Medicare, original Medicare. And so to find out more about this stuff, you need Hans' book, The Complete Cardinal Guide to Planning for and Living in Retirement, which includes the seven worries tabs, one of which is Medicare to understand.

And it's just a wonderful thing. Go to cardinalguide.com to order Hans' book. Obviously he's also on YouTube. It's a very popular video series that he does.

Hans is always a lot of fun. Yeah, thank you. Thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed Finishing Well, brought to you by cardinalguide.com. Visit cardinalguide.com for free downloads of this show or previous shows on topics such as Social Security, Medicare, IRAs, long-term care, life insurance, investments and taxes, as well as Hans' best-selling book, The Complete Cardinal Guide to Planning for and Living in Retirement, and the workbook. Once again, for dozens of free resources, past shows, or to get Hans' book, go to cardinalguide.com. If you have a question, comment, or suggestion for future shows, click on The Finishing Well radio show on the website and send us a word. Once again, that's cardinalguide.com. Cardinalguide.com. This is the Truth Network.