Medicare Advantage may be coming to your local Costco warehouse store. Retailer Costco Wholesale COST and nonprofit insurer SCAN Group said they have agreed to sell jointly branded Medicare Advantage and Medicare supplement plans. Marvell's stock surges on news of Google chip deal — and Broadcom's falls I'm 63, a retired CPA with a $1.2 million 401(k).
Do I need to bother with a Roth conversion? The companies will start by selling jointly branded Medicare Advantage products in two states, and a Medicare supplement plan in a third, according to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported on the partnership. Those markets have about around 5 million Medicare enrollees, the report said.
"As a longtime Costco customer, I know that if I walk into a Costco store, I'm just going to buy the item because they've done the work for me to make sure that it's a high-quality, high-value product," said Sachin Jain, SCAN's president and CEO. "I would say that that's what seniors are increasingly looking for in their Medicare experience." A Medicare supplement plan, or Medigap, is extra insurance you can buy from a private health-insurance company to help cover out-of-pocket costs in traditional Medicare, like copayments, coinsurance and deductibles. Jain described the supplemental policies and Medicare managed products as being "designed around Costco." He also noted that older adults will be able to use their benefits at retailers where they actually shop, "as opposed to forcing people to go to work with vendors that they've never heard of." The move comes as other Medicare Advantage providers are curtailing markets and trimming benefits to offset rising costs in the health-insurance market.
Medicare Advantage, which is the private insurance alternative to traditional Medicare, controls more than half of the overall Medicare market. The cost of prescription medications is closely watched by senior citizens, who are typically on a fixed income and may find it difficult to adjust to a price increase. Earlier this month, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services said it was ending a temporary program that helped keep the price of Medicare monthly premiums in check for older adults with Part D prescription-drug plans.
Read: Health insurers are dumping Medicare Advantage plans. Here's how many seniors could be affected. "Costco has built something exceedingly rare: trust at scale.
Its members believe that if Costco puts its name on something, it has been carefully vetted for quality and value. That trust was earned one decision and one member experience at a time. That is exactly the kind of trust healthcare desperately needs," Jain wrote on LinkedIn.
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