A health insurance broker is sounding the alarm to help make sure people get the plan they want and the most for their money.<\/p>\n
These warnings are for the more than a million Minnesotans eligible for Medicare \u2014 one of his biggest concerns is something new for this year: some providers placing caps on certain plans.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cYou could wake up in two weeks, you could wake up in two days, and the plan you were thinking about is gone. And when it\u2019s gone, it\u2019s gone,\u201d Grant Rockwood, of MN Benefits<\/a>, told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS, adding he\u2019s never seen it before in the state.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Rockwood says these plans are now being treated as \u201cfirst come, first serve.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s been one company that\u2019s been clear about [it], at least to brokers, that say, \u2018Hey, this plan is at, after the first day it was at over 50% capacity.\u2019 Then they said after last week it was at like 90% capacity,\u201d he added.\u00a0<\/p>\n RELATED: Minnesota health insurance rates could jump as much as 21%<\/a><\/p>\n Another factor he\u2019s warning people about is that some providers are not automatically re-enrolling people to similar plans, as they\u2019ve done in previous years. Rockwood says, though, that doesn\u2019t mean there aren\u2019t similar plans available.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhen they receive these initial notices, perhaps it\u2019s hard to capture that in a letter, but it\u2019s not clear to people that \u2018Oh, I do have [very] similar options with the same company the next year,’\u201d Rockwood said.\u00a0<\/p>\n He\u2019s also heard from clients about limited customer assistance \u2014 sharing some have waited for more than an hour on the phone, only to still have questions.<\/p>\n \u201cThat real guidance is harder to come by,\u201d Rockwood said. \u201cThese carriers [just aren\u2019t] set up the way they used to be with a \u2026 large number of internal employees there to answer questions.\u201d<\/p>\n Open enrollment for Medicare runs through Dec. 7 \u2014 the state also has resources to help<\/a>.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tFor Related Stories:\u00a0Ben Henry<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0Health<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0Health Insurance<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0Healthcare<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0Medical<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0Medicare<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A health insurance broker is sounding the alarm to help make sure people get the plan they want…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":658392,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[87458,163,3986,521,85,46,502,4213],"class_list":["post-658391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-ben-henry","tag-health","tag-health-insurance","tag-healthcare","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-medical","tag-medicare"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=658391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658391\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/658392"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=658391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=658391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=658391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}