Counselors who help seniors consider Medicare insurance options say they have found a troubling number of inaccuracies on a federal government website for making health plan choices. Since open enrollment began in October, counselors said they have seen a number of errors with the premiums reported for various health plans on the Medicare.gov website, including instances when all options were listed as charging no premium when that is true only for a subset of health plans, according to officials with the Metropolitan Area Agency on Aging, a nonprofit group based in North St. Paul. While problems with premium prices haven’t been surfacing as often in recent weeks, counselors said they are still finding errors with information displayed about consumers’ out-of-pocket medication costs. “We believe that it is quite serious,” said Dawn Simonson, executive director of the Metropolitan Area Agency on Aging, which operates a help line for seniors. “We’d like to see an extension of open enrollment once the [website] tool is fixed, in order to give people an opportunity to perhaps disenroll from the plan they’ve selected and enroll in a plan that is the best fit for them based on accurate information.”
Source/more: Minneapolis Star-Tribune