Rich's Tongfamily (Richtong.net add-on)

A good note if you are doing this for your parents or friend. It’s a jungle, there are a zillion websites, but to cut to the chase:

1. First you need to login to SSA.gov, this requires you have a login to, well, login.gov which is the authenticator for all government apps
2. You are going to need a camera phone and a physical copy of your passport or drivers license and you need to have a real US phone number and a real US address. So make sure the person you are helping has all of these
3. Login.gov is going to require that you take a photo with their application and then you get verified. Just loading a photo of a passport doesn’t seem to work, for obvious fraud reasons, so make sure you have a well lit space.
4. On ssa.gov, you should see your social security benefits, hopefully you can browse there
5. At the bottom of this there is an “apply for medicare”. You have three months after your 65th birthday to do this, (but note it takes up to a month to get approved, it is manual). I thought mistakenly, it was just automatic.
6. Then you fill out a huge form. The trickiest part is whether to apply for Part A and Part B. YOu need to apply for both if you want Part C which is medicare advantage.
7. Then you get to wait to see if you are approved and you get a Medicare number

Once this is done you can go to medicare.gov and sign up for a plan, there are zillion different ones, but the most feature rich is Medicare Advantage, it’s expensive at $3-400 a month compare to free with Part A and $200 for Part B, but compared to private plans that’s literally 5x cheaper, but the decoder ring is

1. Part A. This is hospital insurance and is free
2. Part B. This is medical insurance for doctor visits and costs $200/month, very desirable if you can afford it
3. Part C aka Medicare Advantage. I don’t know why this is not Part D, but anyway, this is from private companies, so you have to pick them, but it includes A, B and usually D. Something like $400-600 (but it includes Part B)
4. Part D. Prescription drugs. Also extra cost.

Confused yet, for Part C you can switch every year what you are doing.