I Have Been Reading the Mail the Carriers Send Us. You Should See It Too.
August 2, 2026
Listen Now
Subscribe
Ready to talk with an advisor?
The advisors at American Retirement Advisors have been having these conversations for over 25 years. A no-cost discovery session is the fastest way to find out where you actually stand.
Schedule a Discovery Session
Show Notes
Eddie and Betty's Conversation
Good morning, and welcome to The American Retirement Advisor podcast. I'm Betty, I'm here with Eddie as always, and we've got a Sunday piece from Ian today that has more of an edge on it than his usual weekend essay.
Glad to be here. And you're right about the edge. The title alone tells you the mood he was in. I have been reading the mail the carriers send us. You should see it too.
So the premise is that every summer a steady stream of industry email lands in our advisors' inboxes. Insurance carriers, and the organizations that sit between the carriers and the agencies. Certification is open. Recertification is coming. Join us for a webinar.
Housekeeping, basically. And I want to be fair to it, because there's nothing sinister in any single one of those emails. Taken one at a time they're the most boring documents in American business.
No, and I think that's why it took a whole summer's worth to notice anything. Ian says the reaction he kept having, reading it all in one sitting, was that the people this is about have no idea any of it is happening.
Which brings us to the calendar, and I want to take that first, because it frames every other thing in the piece. The whole argument rests on who finds out when.
Annual Enrollment runs October fifteenth through December seventh. That's the only stretch where a person can change anything. Call it seven weeks.
And on the industry side the clock starts months before that. Not weeks. Months.
June, effectively. The twenty twenty seven certification portals opened on July first. Recertification notices went out the last week of July. There were carrier preview webinars for agents running through the end of the month.
Previewing next year's plan and benefit changes. They call them First Look events, which is a genuinely funny name once you notice who's getting the first look.
Not the person whose prescriptions are riding on it.
No. And this next bit is what I hadn't stitched together before Ian laid it out. The government doesn't publish the full landscape of what's available until the middle to late part of September.
Hold on. So the data you'd need to compare anything at all isn't public until about three weeks before the deadline to use it?
That's the shape of it. Nine months of pricing and filing and negotiating on one side, a September data drop, and then the envelopes land on your table with the clock already running.
I want to stay there a second, because I don't think most people picture it that way at all. The mail showing up feels like the beginning of the process. It's the end of it. Every decision that shaped what's inside those envelopes got made months before, by people who were never talking to you.
That's the frame. Now he's got three things that happened in the last ten days.
Let's take them in his order, because the first one has actual dollars attached. On July twenty eighth, the government announced the end of the Part D Premium Stabilization Demonstration.
Which is a spectacularly boring name for something that matters.
Ian says the name is doing a lot of work to sound boring, and I laughed out loud, because it is. So let me translate. When the Inflation Reduction Act redesigned the drug benefit, premiums on standalone drug plans got jumpy.
Up, I assume. And unevenly.
Both. So in twenty twenty five the government built a temporary cushion. Plans that opted in got a flat fifteen dollar reduction to the base premium, plus a hard thirty five dollar ceiling on how far a plan's total premium could climb in a single year.
The ceiling is the one I'd care about. That's what stops you opening a letter in the fall and discovering your drug coverage doubled.
You went straight to it, and that's the guardrail in this whole story. Then in twenty twenty six they narrowed it. The reduction dropped from fifteen dollars to ten. The ceiling loosened from thirty five up to fifty.
So it was already being wound down in stages.
Gradually, yes. And for next year it's gone. The stated reasoning is that plan sponsors have enough experience now to price on their own, so the program goes back to what they call traditional market conditions.
Take the costume off that phrase for me.
It means there's no longer a dollar limit on how far one plan's premium can move between this year and next.
None?
Not from the demonstration, no. For the last two years there was a specific dollar ceiling on that increase. For twenty twenty seven, there isn't one.
What were the underlying bids doing while this was being decided? A program doesn't get retired in a vacuum.
Good instinct. There's a figure called the national average monthly bid, which is roughly what the drug plans collectively told the government it costs to deliver the basic benefit. It goes from about two hundred thirty nine dollars this year to about two hundred ninety six next year.
That's a serious jump. What does that work out to?
About twenty four percent, in one year. And here's where Ian does something I really respected, because this is precisely the spot where a writer could take a victory lap and mislead everybody reading.
Meaning that bid figure isn't somebody's premium.
It is not, and he says so flatly. There's a separate number, the base beneficiary premium, and that one is still capped by law at six percent growth a year. It's moving from just under thirty nine dollars to a little over forty one.
So the floor stays protected. It's the movement at the individual plan level that lost its restraint.
That's the distinction, and he draws it deliberately. One number is legally held down. The other one just had its limit removed. His line is that if you're on a standalone drug plan, that's the most financially relevant sentence in the article.
I'd agree. But I don't want to hand somebody an anxiety with no next step attached. What does a person do with this?
Open the notice your plan sends this fall instead of setting it on the counter. That's the whole action, and it's precisely the one people skip.
And whether a particular plan moves a lot or barely at all is genuinely a question for one of our advisors. It varies plan by plan and there's no honest way to answer it in the general case.
Agreed. Second thing.
This is the one I think he was angriest about. It's about how agents get paid.
Go ahead.
Commissions on these plans have always been set by the carrier. The government publishes a maximum, and then each company decides whether to pay all of it, some of it, or none at all.
None is genuinely on the menu?
It always has been. And for next year the published maximums actually went up. First year on a Medicare Advantage enrollment goes from six hundred ninety four dollars to seven hundred twenty five. On a drug plan, from one hundred fourteen to one hundred thirty, which is a fourteen percent bump.
So on paper the compensation improved.
Briefly, yes. Now hold that up against what's been happening in practice, because the two things point in opposite directions. For the last two enrollment seasons, several of the largest national carriers have quietly set commissions to zero on selected plans.
Zero as in reduced, or zero as in nothing?
Not a dollar. He's specific about it. Not trimmed, not discounted. It's a way of steering agents away from business a company has decided it doesn't want.
Then follow that through. If a plan pays an agent nothing, the agent has a financial reason never to bring it up. And somewhere out there is a household for whom that unmentioned plan was the right answer.
That is almost word for word the sentence he writes. He doesn't dance around it at all.
It's an uncomfortable thing to put in print when you're the one running the company. Most people in his chair would point at the industry and quietly stand behind it.
His position is that he'd rather you hear it from him than find it out on your own. And I think that's why the essay works.
Does any of this become visible to a regular person, or does it stay inside the trade?
That's the new part. According to industry reporting, the government opened fields this summer for carriers to report their pay rates plan by plan and flag the ones paying nothing. Submissions were due at the end of July, and the information goes public before enrollment opens.
So it moves from something the industry knew to something a household could look up. That's a real change, and it explains why he wrote this in August instead of October.
That's the timing. Writing it in October would have wasted the one year where a person can finally check for themselves.
How does he say our own advisors handle the conflict? Because it would be easy to describe the problem and never answer for it.
He doesn't let himself off. When someone sits down in our office, the recommendation has to come out of that person's doctors, their prescriptions, and their budget. Never out of a pay schedule.
And if it ever stops being that?
His words. We'd just be a distribution channel wearing a nicer shirt. I read that line twice.
That'll stick with me. All right, the third one is a change of key, isn't it.
A big one. While all of that was going on, the government published something genuinely good. On July thirty first they finalized a nationwide expansion of a joint replacement program.
Hips and knees. Ankles too, I think.
All three. And the mechanism is that the hospital becomes financially accountable for the whole episode, from the operation through ninety days of recovery, instead of just the surgery.
That is a real improvement, and I'll tell you why it lands for me. My mother had a knee done and the operation was the easy part. It was the eight weeks afterward where everything got dropped between people.
That's the exact gap it aims at. An earlier version ran in thirty four metro areas and produced somewhere near a hundred and thirteen million dollars in net savings, with quality holding steady.
So why does something this positive land in an article about a mess? On its face it's the good news of the week.
And he says so. He specifically writes that he doesn't want to be cynical about it. But there are two footnotes and they're both about timing.
Which are?
It's mandatory nationwide starting January first, twenty twenty eight. Not next year. The year after next.
And the second?
It applies to Original Medicare.
Ah. So the cheerful announcement and the thing squeezing your drug premium aren't even happening on the same side of the program, or in the same year.
Which is the whole reason he puts it third. He isn't saying the announcement is bad. He's saying look at what one person is being asked to hold in their head simultaneously.
Then let me lay it out the way he does. A drug plan guardrail expiring in December. A pay structure that quietly makes some options invisible. A hospital reform arriving in twenty twenty eight, for one side of the program. A landscape that isn't published until late September. And a three week window to decide.
And not one piece of that is hidden or leaked or confidential. That's the part I keep coming back to.
None of it. It's all public right now. His line is that it's published in four different languages, in four different places, on four different clocks, by people who are talking to each other and not to you.
That's the sentence of the piece. It isn't a conspiracy, it's an audience problem.
And he admits it cost him most of a morning to line those four up next to each other, with a team that reads this material for a living. Which is a generous way of saying nobody should feel slow for finding it confusing.
He writes that he doesn't envy anyone sorting through it alone. And then he does the thing that earns the whole essay, which is refuse to end on the complaint.
What's the ending?
He points at a fix. There's a live broadcast being put together for Saturday, October third, walking through the landscape as it will actually stand for next year, and how to get through it.
October third is not an accidental date. The full landscape comes out in the middle to late part of September, so that's late enough to be accurate and early enough to still be worth something. Enrollment opens twelve days later.
And he's blunt that it isn't a sales event. It's educational, built to be useful whether you ever work with us or not, and he says plainly they won't use it to sell a plan. The goal is that when the mail starts arriving, you can read it.
How does somebody hear about it? It sounds like there's no signup page yet.
Not yet. For now, send a note to Judi, and that's Judi spelled J, U, D, I, at american retire dot com. You'll be told as soon as there's a page. No cost to attend.
And if you'd rather talk to a person before October comes, that's what our team is for. They walk families through all of this as part of every plan, at no cost to you. Six oh two, two eight one, three eight nine eight.
One last thing from me. Of everything in this article, the drug plan guardrail is the piece with a deadline on it. That's this fall. The rest is context you can take your time with.
That's the one to write down. Though my favorite is how he closes. The industry has had since June to get ready for next year. It seems fair that you get more than three weeks.
Hard to argue with that.
Go read it this morning, it's on the site now. I'm Betty, that's Eddie, and this has been The American Retirement Advisor. Take good care of yourselves.