Thursday, October 1, 2026 |
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The Last Page.
The last page, first.
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Medicare Says Premiums Held. The $0 Drug Plans Are Gone.
The agency that set next year’s drug prices says they held. The analysts who read the same file line by line came out somewhere else.
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The drug plan notice is one piece of retirement mail this fall. It will have company.
An email announcing a new 401(k) investment option is coming to 70 million inboxes. Most will delete it – and miss what Larry Benedict calls the decade’s biggest opportunity. He’s naming the one ticker to own before it arrives – free. Watch here. |
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The story
Next year the average stand-alone drug plan goes from $35.09 a month to about $36.
That is the whole increase. Less than a dollar.
Administrator Mehmet Oz said the agency is keeping premiums stable by slashing handouts to big insurance companies. He puts 93 percent of the people outside Extra Help inside an enhanced plan under $6 a month.
KFF went through the same file plan by plan. Its count of stand-alone drug plans falls from 360 to 312. Not one of the 312 carries a zero premium outside Extra Help.
This year 28 percent of those outside Extra Help sat in a plan that charged them zero.
Juliette Cubanski of KFF told AARP on Tuesday that many will see modest increases and others big jumps. Your own notice was due in the mail yesterday.
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Extra Help
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The federal subsidy for people on Medicare who live on very little and have little put away. It covers most of the drug premium, and next year it is the only way a plan can still cost nothing.
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If you opened the envelope
January 2027
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If the premium was zero
April 2027
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Best case
JANUARY 2027. You opened the envelope in October and went looking. The shelf was smaller than the year before. Every price on it a real one.
Centene came in at the bottom again. Its Wellcare plans were quoted at $5.30 a month across much of the country. So you moved in November, and January opened clean.
That smaller shelf is the competition the government was betting on, and it turned up in your own region.
The deductible is the part that bites now. It went from $615 to $700, and you covered that stretch before the plan paid a dollar. Your money first, then theirs.
So the hour you spent at the kitchen table in October bought you the whole year. The premium became the smallest line on your bank statement. At the pharmacy counter they charged you what the notice said they would.
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Worst case
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APRIL 2027. The plan that cost you nothing last year started charging, because for 2027 they all do. Nothing in the machinery knew to pay it.
A plan priced at zero never asks your bank for anything.
Rebecca Gouty runs West Virginia’s Medicare counseling program. She described the same trap last July. A zero premium stops the Social Security deduction, and the enrollee has to elect it again.
Your bill came in an envelope like every other envelope. Gina Upchurch of Senior PharmAssist put the reaction plainly in that same reporting: “why wouldn’t they think this was a scam?”
So the grace period ran out and the plan dropped you in the spring. About 140,000 Wellcare members went that way in April 2026. Some of them over $8.10 for three months.
Now you buy your own pills until the next window opens, and a penalty comes back with you. One percent of the base premium for every month you went uncovered, for as long as you hold a drug plan.
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How it ends
You get a drug bill that grew almost everywhere except the premium, unless your plan charged you nothing this year.
We ran it both ways, and that flat average is doing more work than it looks.
It held because the bottom end of the shelf was taken away. The count of plans fell by forty-eight, and every one that charged nothing stopped. An average only describes what is still for sale.
On Friday our verdict was a bigger bill and one short window to fix it. We sent you to the premium line to find it. Right ending, wrong line.
The bill did get bigger, and it grew next door. The deductible goes from $615 to $700, and your ceiling on out-of-pocket spending moves from $2,100 to $2,400.
And for that 28 percent, a charge now appears on a line that never carried one.
The lowest-priced drug plan on the open shelf costs money now. No average will ever show you that, and the envelope on your counter already has.
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On your notice, find the line for what you paid each month this year. If it reads zero, the deduction from your Social Security check was switched off, and it stays off until you ask your plan to restart it. Shopping for a cheaper plan runs October 15 to December 7.
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Gold was still up about 9.5 percent on the year on Tuesday, even after its September slide.
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One story a weekday, taken to its ending and left there. If you would rather keep them open, the door is below.
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The Last Page.
The last page, first. Reply and name the story you want finished.
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