The dates are not approximate
The Medicare Annual Enrollment Period runs October 15 through December 7. Not mid-October through early December. The plan has to have your enrollment request in hand by December 7, and Medicare does not grant extensions because the mail was slow or the website timed out.
Submit by the first week of December if you possibly can. Applications get kicked back for ordinary reasons: a transposed digit in a Medicare number, a plan that turns out not to be offered in your county, a middle initial that does not match Social Security records. If that happens on December 6 you have one day to fix it. If it happens on November 20 you have plenty of time and it becomes a non-event.
What you can change, and what you cannot
AEP is broad. Almost every move between Medicare Advantage, Original Medicare, and Part D is available to you during these eight weeks. One important move is not.
| Change | Allowed during AEP? |
|---|---|
| Original Medicare to a Medicare Advantage plan | Yes |
| Medicare Advantage back to Original Medicare | Yes |
| One Medicare Advantage plan to a different one | Yes |
| One Part D drug plan to a different one | Yes |
| Adding Part D drug coverage | Yes |
| Dropping Part D drug coverage | Yes, though a late penalty may apply later |
| Buying or switching a Medicare Supplement (Medigap) policy | No, not as a right |
The Medigap trap, and why it is worse in Arkansas
This is the part that catches people, and it catches them badly enough that it is worth putting ahead of everything else.
AEP gives you the right to leave a Medicare Advantage plan and go back to Original Medicare. It does not give you the right to buy a Medicare Supplement policy to go with it. Those are two separate decisions governed by two separate sets of rules, and the second one is not on Medicare's calendar at all.
Arkansas has no birthday rule. It has no annual guaranteed issue window. Outside your one-time six-month Medigap open enrollment, which starts when you are 65 and enrolled in Part B, or a specific guaranteed issue situation such as involuntarily losing employer coverage, a Medigap carrier in Arkansas can ask you health questions and decline you. Roughly a dozen states give their residents an annual do-over. Arkansas is not one of them.
Do it in this order. Apply for the Medicare Supplement policy first. Get the approval in writing. Then drop the Medicare Advantage plan. Reverse that order and a January decline leaves you on Original Medicare with a 20% coinsurance share and no annual out-of-pocket cap, which is the worst position in Medicare.
There is one piece of good news specific to this state. Arkansas requires Medigap carriers to use community rating, so your premium is not tied to your age and does not climb on your birthday the way it does in most states. What moves your premium is the carrier raising rates across its whole Arkansas block. That makes a carrier's rate increase history more useful than its opening quote, and it is worth asking for before you sign anything.
Open the envelope that came in September
Every Medicare Advantage and Part D plan mails an Annual Notice of Change each September. It is a plain document, it is not marketing, and it lists exactly what the plan is doing to you on January 1: drugs coming off the formulary, drugs moving to a higher tier, copays going up, providers leaving the network.
Most people throw it away. The number of Arkansans who call in February, angry that a medication they have taken for six years is suddenly a specialty tier, is not small, and the letter explaining that arrived in their mailbox the previous September. Nothing about the fix is complicated. It just has to happen before December 7, and after that it cannot happen at all.
Check drugs and networks, not premiums
Two rules do most of the work in a plan comparison, and neither of them is about the monthly premium.
Price your actual medications. A plan with a higher premium that covers your prescription at a preferred tier routinely beats a cheaper plan that puts the same drug on tier 4. Compare the full year: premium, deductible, and what you will hand the pharmacist in each month. The premium is the number on the mailer. The drug cost is the number that shows up on your bank statement.
Verify your providers with the provider. Baptist Health, CHI St. Vincent, UAMS, and Conway Regional do not all participate in the same Medicare Advantage networks, and participation is renegotiated year to year. Plan directories go stale. Call the billing office at your cardiologist and ask whether they will be in network for the specific plan, by name, in the coming year. It takes four minutes and it is the single most useful thing you can do during AEP.
When your new coverage starts
January 1. That is true whether you enrolled on October 16 or December 6, and there is no advantage to waiting. Your current plan runs through December 31, so there is no gap and no period where you are uninsured. If you submit more than one enrollment during the window, the last one the plan receives before December 7 is the one that takes effect, and the earlier ones are simply superseded.
If December 7 gets away from you
You are not out of options, but the options narrow considerably.
- If you are already in a Medicare Advantage plan, the Medicare Advantage Open Enrollment Period from January 1 to March 31 lets you make one change: switch to another Advantage plan, or drop back to Original Medicare and pick up a standalone drug plan.
- If your circumstances changed, a Special Enrollment Period may be open to you. Moving out of your plan service area, losing employer coverage, and gaining or losing Extra Help or Medicaid eligibility all qualify.
- If you are on Original Medicare with no Advantage plan and no qualifying circumstance, you wait until the next October 15. There is no appeal for having missed the date.
AEP is not the marketplace open enrollment
These two get confused constantly, partly because they overlap on the calendar and partly because the advertising for both runs at the same time. ACA Open Enrollment runs November 1 through January 15 on HealthCare.gov and is for people buying their own coverage who are not on Medicare. Medicare AEP runs October 15 through December 7 and is for people who already have Medicare. If you are on Medicare, the marketplace is not where you shop, and it is generally illegal for anyone to knowingly sell you a marketplace plan.
What to have in front of you
Whether you work through this yourself on Medicare Plan Finder or sit down with an agent, the same five things make it go quickly: your Medicare number and Part A and Part B start dates, a list of every medication with its dosage, the pharmacy you actually use, the names of the doctors you want to keep, and last year's Annual Notice of Change.
Working with a broker costs you nothing. Compensation comes from the carrier and is built into the plan whether you use an agent or not, so the premium is identical either way. What you get for it is somebody who has already run the county's plans against a hundred other medication lists this fall. Lancaster Cook is AHIP certified and licensed in Arkansas, license #8021079, and works with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Arkansas, United Healthcare, Humana, Aetna, and Mutual of Omaha.