Folks need to check their state. I know I can switch to regular Medicare during the open enrollment period without underwriting, but that might be because the large group I get my retiree health insurance through allows this.
Rules vary by state. In some states, underwriting is not required. However, it’s not impossible to pass the underwriting - my SIL was able to pass underwriting & switch when she was 71. Our agent told us that agents have a pretty decent handle on who will pass underwriting at different companies.
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Luckily for us, we live in CT, which does not require medical underwriting to switch to a Medigap policy.
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In case anyone was like me and was curious about which states have different medical underwriting policies,
In Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, and New York, insurers must let you buy a Medigap plan at any time of the year, as long as you’re 65 or older, without requiring medical underwriting. (Source)
Five states—California, Idaho, Illinois, Nevada, and Oregon—feature “birthday rules”, granting Medigap enrollees a 30-day window of Guaranteed Issue Rights to select any Medigap plan without medical underwriting. (Source)
Additionally, many states implement a “birthday rule” but it varies in terms of the conditions. Some states let one switch policies with the same company or its affiliates only (more or less comprehensive policies) without medical underwriting, others allow one to switch carriers with no medical underwriting, but only for a plan that is equal or less than one’s current plan, etc. (source).
And to bring this back to the thread topic, I haven’t retired yet. My spouse and I have talked about one of us going to a lower-paid district for our last years of employment in order to qualify for better retiree health insurance, but it’s doubtful whether we will do that as there may be other health care coverage we qualify for due to military service without needing to switch employers. We plan to continue working until our kid has graduated from college (or within about 5 years or so of high school graduation, should our kid decide on a 10-year college completion path or something like that).
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This isn’t completely accurate for CA. You are restricted to selecting a policy with the same or lesser benefits as your old policy. See Medicare Supplement Insurance "Medigap" But on the happier side it is a 60-day limit in CA, not 30.
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For federal employees who don’t have to pay IRMMA the cost of BCBS “low” plan plus Medicare appears to be about $440 a month, for 1 person. Some of the plans give a rebate for people who go on Medicare. IF I choose to keep just the “higher” plan for BCBS and not do Medicare, it would be $410 each month (this year - I am not Medicare eligible this year).
H and I are on medicare part B IRMMA. We don’t get a discount from BC/BS FEP Standard option plus one. It’s around $850/ month. Not doing medicare does not seem like an option except for the RX part D which is covered in BC/BS. I have no deductible to pay but still…
H and I are also paying Medicare B IRMAA but glad we can afford to do so (we just close our eyes & pay). We have federal local BCBS family plan, high option, which doesn’t subsidize our BCBS premiums. We like the local BCBS because in theory we can go in person to speak with them when we have hassles for medical billing. Also, all our providers are used to local BCBS.
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Bringing in the ideas of this thread:
My husband and I had a conversation yesterday about a retirement timeline. Originally thinking it would be in our 60s, I’m now thinking it might be in our 70s. We have a 22 and an 18 year old. Currently, we now plan to work longer than we previously thought (in healthcare) because their professional future is so uncertain.
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It is a remarkably perilous environment from the standpoint of jobs. It did not occur to me that this would cause people to extend employment, but it makes sense. I have read about people who are retiring because they don’t want to figure out how to integrate AI into their jobs (which they would have to do if they don’t retire). Thanks very much @familyrock for sharing. Really interesting. It is actually hard to know what advice to give college students at this point.
Both of my kids are in fields that are reasonably protected. ShawSon and wife are in tech in areas that will be changed but not eliminated by AI. ShawD currently does primary care (and is using lots of AI but says most of it takes more time than it saves) but is switching to psychiatric work, where she will talk to patients and then prescribe drugs. I think prescribing psychiatric drugs is probably an area society will be slow to automate. ShawD’s partner is a patent lawyer with a science PhD and then a law degree. Law is a profession that seems very vulnerable to LLMs, but I wonder if patent law is less so. Not sure.
I am loving adding AI to my work and beyond.
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Just did our taxes. Looks like we will bump up to IRMMA territory…I think. We tried very hard to stay below the amount to do this. We shall see.
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This is a bit of a catch 22. If us old people don’t stop working, there won’t be jobs that we vacate to be filled by young people.
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At least in biotech/pharma, AI hasn’t made a huge dent in either patent prosecution or litigation. For example, I can’t just dump a table of my compounds and activity data into some AI interface and ask it to draft a patent application that would create layers of genera of compounds based on the information from the table as well as cover all possible infringement scenarios, maximization of patent term, etc. Need a human attorney’s head for that. Litigation is where apparently AI has made some inroads when it comes to brief drafting or discovery, but litigation is more than just a pile of papers. Patent litigation involves technical experts, depositions, juries - dealing with humans which can be worse than herding cats. So IMO, your FSIL job is safe for now.
Plus, I don’t see the patent office or state bars issuing licenses to practice law to AI any time soon. 
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Great to see the folks embracing the positive sides of new technology. Are you mostly using email-analysis and chatgpt-like functions? Or other cool applications too?
With medicine an exception. Our society needs so many more doctors, nurses, therapists, etc. Medical schools and residencies cannot produce enough practitioners to keep up with the need.
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A few things. I am using AI to help me write papers. The first was a proposal for an audacious project to prevent further deforestation of the Amazon rainforest using a novel financial approach. The idea was mine but I asked ChatGPT to rewrite it from the viewpoint of a finance person. It made one error but really improved the writing and added an idea that has been very helpful. An international mediator asked if we could use the same idea to reduce the probability of war between the US and China. I did not have a lot of time but four hours with ChatGPT produced a white paper that people are devoting time to now.
I am using it to write proposals for clients to speed up that process. I have not used it yet to make slides, but I will give it a try. We recently used a firm that used AI and network analysis to help us understand the social media space in a particular industry relevant to a client. They are giving me a very narrow AI agent that can respond like AI thinks one of the parties will respond to various trigger situations. I’ve even used it to analyze water demand caused by AI data centers.
I’m trying to get it to write an academic paper that revisits a paper that my coauthor and I wrote years ago that did not get the notice that it should have and reframes the underlying idea and populates it with a number of good examples. So far, ChatGPT’s product is not that good – too thin and not subtle enough. I’m going to give Claude a try. I’ve been prepping Claude with a description of what I do and what my writing should be like. I will work on this over the weekend.
And, I’m going to use Claude to write an app that helps Medicare subscribers with Part D prescription plans to figure out how and where to get their prescriptions at the lowest cost. I started with ChatGPT but people tell me that Claude does it better.
Plus lots of personal stuff. How to get my Apple TV to update my Zwift software when it is hanging and how to find a Zwift robopacer or group that cycles at my speed. I even used it to design some workouts for me that I could install in Zwift. I also used ChatGPT to find a certain kind of expenditure in different credit card bills from ShawSon’s wedding and get me the total spent from particular vendors net refunds to help with ShawD’s wedding planning.
My idea is to expand my mind.
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Very cool!
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Can we take AI discussions elsewhere?
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Anyone who wants to participate in the AI discussion that started this drift will find it here.
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A friend in the risk/compliance at a bank gave her retirement notice few months ago. She was going to retire next week before we went on a tour. She was saying I should do the same.
Her boss just asked her to stay until December by giving her a very nice package. She just accepted it. I told her that I may retire before she does.
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