You can call 1-800-Medicare if you want to check your 2014 enrollment because the Medicare website will only show the plan you are using for 2013 – and it only applies to Medicare Advantage and part D insurance. If you try to enroll without any special enrollment period and have preexisting conditions in most states they can deny you. They won’t try to figure out if you would qualify for government assistance to pay for your premiums (yes, there are low income assistance programs for people on Medicare) but it’s unlikely IBM retirees would qualify. Under highly plausible assumptions about the utility function, willingness to pay for probabilistic insurance should be very close to willingness to pay for standard insurance less the default risk. I was surprised because the insurance company for my plan was quick to notify Extend Health that my plan was accepted. After you enroll using Extend Health services, they send your application to the insurance company that sells the policy.

The ONLY reason to use IBM’s Extend Health setup to buy an insurance policy is it will trigger you to be able to get your IBM HRA or IBM FHA subsidy. It is NOT. What IBM is doing is basically offloading our health insurance benefits to a third party who then decides what options to offer to us and at what price based on whatever subsidy IBM pays them. Here’s my biggest fear for our future – the next thing IBM will offload is our pension plan ala what some other companies have done. 1. The insurance plan tells you that you have been enrolled. I have successfully enrolled. 4. EH sends you a letter saying you have been successfully enrolled. A reason Medicare might do it is if they think you already have coverage a different way. We don’t know what the offerings are yet but there are a few big changes that I think I see but don’t completely understand.

Attempt a car insurance comparison and you’ll see that the least expensive car insurance usually has the greatest level of excess. The analysis then presents a theoretical outline of an ideal insurance system, in which one could insure freely against any economically relevant event, and then contrasts it with the existing risk-shifting institutions. It is my plan to buy one insurance policy from EH to get access to my subsidy and the rest of my insurance policies from EH only if they are cheapest, best policies I can buy in the open marketplace. Also, if you get any kind of subsidy from IBM (e.g., part B premium payments) IBM will now put that money into an HRA and then you have to file claims against that HRA to access the money. I continue to believe IBM is using Extend Health because IBM believes we will not use up all of the subsidy money in our accounts and that will translate to millions of dollars of reduced expense to IBM.

Also, IBM could have just given us access to HRA accounts without having Extend Health as a middle man and allowed us to spend the money as we pleased on medical services – even forgo buying insurance policies. That means that policies in New York will be more expensive than policies in, say, Ohio. More to come – just wanted to give you an early warning. There are hundreds of them sprinkled around the country and they just might have that part you need. 12/26/13 Update: EH responded to my email by calling to tell me they had received notification from my spouse’s part D plan so the application process is complete. How coincidental that they got notification shortly after receiving my email. I just sent a second email to Extend Health telling them we are concerned about the status. Well, here it is December 20th and the EH website application status is still “open”.