10 Steps to Take After You Sign Up for Medicare

3. Alert your pharmacy and doctors’ offices

Make sure they know you’ve joined Medicare, have your Medicare card and have information from your Part D prescription card or Medicare Advantage plan. If you’re on Medicare Advantage, reconfirm that your doctors and pharmacy are in your plan’s network.

This will avoid your former insurer wrongly getting billed.

4. Schedule a Welcome to Medicare visit with your doctor

This one-time preventive visit is available only during the first 12 months after your Part B coverage begins. It’s free if your provider accepts assignment.

A doctor who accepts assignment agrees to charge you no more than the amount Medicare has approved for the service. A physician who participates in Medicare but doesn’t accept assignment could charge you up to 15 percent more than the approved amounts.

The Welcome to Medicare visit can help identify health screenings and services you may need. The appointment also will establish a baseline for comparison during future annual wellness visits that Medicare will pay for.

5. Study up on how coverage works

This will be especially important if you have secondary insurance, such as Medicaid or a newly purchased Medigap supplemental policy, a private retiree plan, federal health benefits or Tricare military health insurance. If Medicare is your primary insurer, it will pay up to the limits of its coverage, then send the rest to the secondary payer to cover all or most of what remains.

If you’re a veteran who qualifies for U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health care, you have additional options within that separate system, but you generally can’t use Medicare and VA benefits simultaneously with the same provider. If you’re living outside the United States, you may not be able to use all Medicare services.

If you or your spouse are still working, Medicare coverage gets more complex. You have to think about:

• Separate insurance for a younger spouse not yet eligible for Medicare
• The size of the company where you or your spouse works and how that private coverage works with Medicare
• How COBRA coverage, continuation of your employer’s insurance when you’ve retired or been laid off, can complement Medicare — but only if you’re offered it after age 65

So the more you understand the process, the better.

6. Know what Medicare doesn’t cover

Medicare won’t pay for much of what insurance at your old workplace might have covered, so you’ll have to make room in your budget for those expenses or find add-on insurance.

Original Medicare doesn’t cover most dental, hearing and vision care. If you’re enrolled in Medicare Advantage, you may have varying degrees of coverage beyond teeth cleaning, a hearing test and an allowance toward eyeglasses.

Neither original Medicare nor Medicare Advantage covers long-term care in an assisted living center or a nursing home if you need help with bathing, dressing, eating or meal preparation. So consider long-term care insurance now while you’re younger and healthier to cover those potential future expenses.

Planning a “retirementmoon” or a cruise? Be aware that Medicare doesn’t cover care outside the United States in most cases, though a few exceptions apply.

7. Make sure your finances are in order

If money is tight and you’re worried about paying your Medicare premiums or copayments, check into Medicare’s programs for beneficiaries with limited incomes and not much savings.

Medicare Savings Programs (MSPs) may pay your monthly Part B premium, your Part A premium if you have one and potentially other out-of-pocket expenses. Extra Help can help with Part D prescription drug plan premiums and copayments.

Even if you don’t think you’ll qualify, check out the programs. States, which administer the four Medicare Savings Programs, have varying income and asset limits. And income and asset limits for Extra Help are updated every year because of inflation.

Another program to consider if you expect to spend close to your Part D out-of-pocket cap is the Medicare Prescription Payment Plan. It’s not financial aid but will allow you to spread your annual costs in monthly installments that you pay to your plan rather than your pharmacy.

8. Sign up a proxy if you wish

You can authorize a trusted person to speak with Medicare on your behalf and you can do it either through the mail or via your secure online Medicare account.

Medicare generally needs your written permission, via its Authorization to Disclose Personal Health Information Release Form, before it can discuss your info with a family member, friend or caregiver. This is a separate legal form from any paperwork you might have filed to allow a health care proxy or surrogate to make medical decisions for you if you’re not able.

9. Keep track of what you like and don’t

As you figure out what’s working for you and what isn’t in the coverage you’ve selected, remember this: You can change it during open enrollment every Oct. 15 to Dec. 7.

As you age, you will likely need to visit doctors more, get more medical tests and take more prescription drugs. Take an active role in your health care and review your plans every year, especially Part D if you’re in original Medicare and your Medicare Advantage plan if you decided on the private alternative to original Medicare.

You may discover that the list of covered costs, doctors, drugs and pharmacies will change next year for your Medicare Advantage plan, or that copayments, coinsurance, drug coverage or pharmacies won’t stay the same for your Part D prescription plan.

Don’t be surprised. Check out changes in your plan and do some comparison shopping.

10. Watch out for Medicare scams and fraud

Treat your Medicare number as if it were your credit card number. Share it only with your doctors, other health care providers and your health plan.

Review your Medicare summary notices, whether on paper or online, for services you didn’t receive. That can save enrollees money in the long run because fraudulent Medicare claims increase Medicare’s costs, which can contribute to higher Part B premiums.

Senior Medicare Patrols can help you sort through those complicated notices to detect fraud, report errors and advocate to resolve billing disputes. These volunteers, often retirees themselves, work in every state, the District of Columbia and the U.S. territories of Guam, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands through this federally financed program.

In 2024, Senior Medicare Patrol volunteers identified more than $35 million in potential Medicare overpayments and other questionable charges. Some cases resulted in convictions for fraud.

Criminals frequently target Medicare enrollees. Medicare never calls, emails or texts unexpectedly to ask for your Medicare number, bank account or payment information.

This story, originally published Sept. 22, 2022, has been updated with mentions of the lower frequency of mailed Medicare summary notices, what Medicare doesn’t cover, the Medicare Prescription Payment Plan and Medicare scams and fraud to be aware of.