Medicare Complexities – The Pyramid Approach

Lots of us know that Medicare is a very complicated government entitlement program with its own rules and regulations and a pretty complex design.​

But that idea is also front and center in new campaigns from Medicare supplement plans that describe Medicare as a pyramid of various levels, with different parts and pieces fitting together in an interlocking design.

It's enough to make you dizzy. Some of these descriptions of the Medicare program compare it to the vintage government food pyramid, where you have things like grains, proteins, green vegetables, sugar and fat in an ascending set of shaped levels that show us a little bit about how our daily diet should look. But where the food pyramid is intuitive, the Medicare pyramid is just confusing, partly because the parts and pieces themselves may not be labeled well to help people understand just what it is that they do.

Medicare Parts and Pieces

In the Medicare pyramid, you have Medicare parts A and B, and then you have part C and part D, and even part E, where each of these addresses specific parts of your Medicare coverage. It is not a straightforward process, as we pointed out in past blog posts. It really takes some research and some critical thinking to understand how Medicare works. One part covers prescription drugs. But which part is that? One part is essentially an overlap for certain kinds of supplementary cost. All of it is infuriating to someone’s sense of organization and neatness. But when you turn 65, it’s your turn to navigate this world, because not having this unique senior coverage provided by the government is virtually unthinkable, given the costs of modern healthcare.

Medicare Jargon

In addition, many professionals would admit that Medicare is one of the ultimate examples of alphabet soup. What is a BNI or CCIP? The casual reader knows next to nothing about these terms, and finds themselves helplessly marooned on an island of acronyms. Everything in a Medicare transmittal does something different, and the rules that the system gives out to providers are elaborately arcane.

So what if you’re just a regular person who needs help with Medicare?

Get help from Comprehensive Medicare Solutions in Nevada to access the Medicare resources that you need. Or ask for an elderly family member. We’ll walk you through the process and help you to make the decisions that are best, with our experience handling Medicare and related policies. It doesn’t have to be scary, although, without a light, it really is quite a dark forest.