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Next year's Medicare sales calls cannot legally start until Thursday
WHAT CHANGED?
On Thursday, October 1, insurance companies and the agents who sell for them are finally allowed to start marketing 2027 Medicare plans. Not a day sooner. The federal rule is one plain sentence: plans may begin marketing prospective plan year offerings on October 1 of each year for the following contract year.
That single date is quietly useful to you. It turns the autumn flood of calls, mailers and television spots into something you can judge from your own kitchen table. And it comes attached to a second rule that matters more, because that one never expires: even after Thursday, a plan or its agent cannot call you at all unless you are already their member or you gave them permission to call.
WHO IS AFFECTED?
Anyone in a Medicare Advantage plan or a standalone drug plan. Sales pressure aims hardest at you between October and the December 7 deadline.
Anyone who has ever filled in an online quote form, mailed back a reply card, or dialed the number from a television ad. Any one of those can count as the permission that makes a later call legitimate.
Less so if you have Original Medicare with a Medigap policy and no drug plan. You will still get mail, but far fewer sales calls that follow the rules.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN?
It means you do not have to become an expert on next year's plan designs to protect yourself this fall. You only have to notice who started the conversation.
Medicare's published marketing rules are blunt about what a plan or its agent may not do. They may not call you unless you are already a member of that plan or you have given them permission to contact you. They may not come to your home uninvited. They may not ask for your bank account or credit card number over the phone unless it is needed to process an enrollment you asked for. They may not ask you for payment over the phone or online at all, because the plan has to send you a bill. And they may not offer you cash, a gift worth more than $15, or a free meal during a sales pitch.
Medicare puts its own part even more simply. It will never call you to sell you anything, and never turn up at your door.
The one tell: the call came to you. If you did not start it, a rule was already broken before a single benefit was described, and that tells you most of what you need to know about the person on the line, licensed or not.
One honest caveat, because I would rather you hear it from me. Permission is far easier to give than to remember giving. A quote form filled in last spring, a reply card mailed back for a free booklet, a toll-free number called once out of curiosity: any of those can open the door to months of perfectly legal calls. That does not make the pitch good for you. It only means the call is not, by itself, proof of fraud.
WHAT TO DO
Hang up on any 2027 Medicare call you did not ask for, then take back the timing. If you do want to look at next year's coverage, start the conversation yourself, on a number you chose: the one printed on your plan card, or 1-800-MEDICARE (1-800-633-4227), where you can also report a plan or agent that broke any of the rules above. Open Enrollment runs from October 15 through December 7, and whatever you pick takes effect January 1. That is more than seven weeks to decide. Nobody who calls you out of the blue needs your answer today.
If you would rather settle next year's coverage on your own terms, The 2027 Medicare Open Enrollment Decision Kit weighs your current plan against three others on cost, drugs and doctors. Its Excel calculator shows what each plan costs in a normal year, a sick year and a worst year, so you finish December 7 with an answer, not a sales pitch.
SOURCE: Medicare's rules for what plans and agents can and cannot do
Written by Ellen Marsh
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