Three plans at work. What feels like three hundred at 65. Happy Labor Day.
September 7, 2026
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Show Notes
Eddie and Betty's Conversation
Welcome to The American Retirement Advisor. I'm Betty, and Eddie's here with me in the studio today, and we are so glad you found us. We're talking about something today that I think is going to feel really familiar to a lot of people, maybe uncomfortably familiar. It comes out of a piece written by Ian Schaeffer, who is the COO of American Retirement Advisors, and he wrote it as a Labor Day reflection. But honestly, the more I read it, the more I thought this isn't really about Labor Day at all. It's about a very specific kind of fear that hits people around Medicare time, and he puts his finger on exactly where that fear comes from in a way I haven't seen anyone explain before.
Thanks for having me in. And I read this piece twice, which I don't always do, because the first time through I kept stopping and thinking, yes, that is the thing, that is what people are actually describing when they call us rattled. He doesn't start with Medicare at all, which I thought was a smart move.
He starts with his wife starting a new nursing job.
Right, and this little kitchen table scene that is so ordinary, so recognizable. They get her benefits packet, they sit down after dinner, they look at three health plans, they compare the deductibles, they make sure her doctor is in the network, and they're done before the dishes are dry. His words. And neither of them lost a minute of sleep over it.
Which, when you say it out loud, sounds almost too easy. Three plans, pick one, done.
And the reason it was easy is the part he zeroes in on. He says somebody in HR had already sat with a broker and thrown out the bad ones. The employee doesn't have to trust the insurance company. They just have to trust the company they already work for. That's doing a lot of work in that sentence.
So there's a layer of protection built in that people don't even notice is there.
Completely invisible. And KFF, which tracks employer health benefits, found that seventy-six percent of firms that offer health coverage offer only one type of plan. One. Not three like Ian's wife got. One. So for most working Americans, the choosing is essentially done for them. A professional sorted it, a professional negotiated it, and if something goes wrong with a claim, there is a person down the hall you can walk to.
I keep thinking about that phrase he uses, because it's real. When you're working, there's an HR department. There's accountability. That job is tied to getting this right for you.
And then, as Ian puts it, you turn that age. And the sorting stops.
He actually writes that line twice. It appears, then a new paragraph: you turn sixty-five, and the sorting stops. The repetition is doing something. Wait — I need to follow the instructions. Let me rewrite properly. That phrase appears twice in the piece. A new paragraph, then the same line again: and the sorting stops. The repetition is doing something.
It lands like a door closing. Because that's what it is. And what opens on the other side is this landscape that feels, in his word, like three hundred choices.
Is that an exaggeration, or is that actually what people are looking at?
He says the honest number is smaller, but not by enough to matter. And then he gives you a real example. In Arizona for 2026, the federal government's own count is a hundred and thirty-three Medicare Advantage plans and ten stand-alone drug plans. That's just in Arizona. Then you layer in Medicare Supplement policies. In Maricopa County alone, thirty-two different companies sell Plan G.
Same coverage, all of them.
And the price for that identical plan runs from about a hundred and thirty-one dollars a month to more than five hundred. So the range on a standardized plan, one where the benefits are literally required by law to be the same, is nearly four to one. That is not a small difference. That is hundreds of dollars a year, potentially thousands.
And someone who doesn't know that those plans are standardized might assume the more expensive one must be better somehow.
Which is a completely reasonable assumption in almost every other consumer market. Usually when something costs more, you're getting more. Medicare Supplement doesn't work that way, and that's exactly the kind of thing that trips people up.
Okay, so here's what I find a little reassuring about what Ian writes next. He says not all of that stack is really yours to choose from. Your county narrows it, your doctors narrow it, your prescriptions narrow it. So the real universe of relevant plans is actually smaller.
That is the reassuring part, yes. The problem is nobody hands you the already-trimmed list. You get the whole stack in the mailbox. And it is on you to figure out which ones actually apply to your situation.
So the work of trimming falls to the person who is least equipped to do the trimming, because they're new to this.
That's a really good way to put it. And it's not because they're less capable than they were at forty-five. Ian makes that point very clearly. He says it was never that people at sixty-five are less capable. It's that at forty-five, the choosing was done by someone accountable to you. At sixty-five, it's done by you, alone, in a system that wasn't built to be walked alone.
That phrase stayed with me. I think that's the most honest description of Medicare complexity I've ever read. Because it's not saying Medicare is bad. It's saying this system requires guidance, and that guidance is not automatically provided the way it was at work.
And then there's this piece that I think is underappreciated. He mentions that every fall, the plans change. The letters come and you get to do it all over again. It's not a one-time decision that you make at sixty-five and put away. It recurs. Annually.
Which means even people who did their homework three years ago and picked thoughtfully might be sitting on a plan that has quietly shifted in ways they haven't noticed.
Right. The formulary changes, the network changes, the premium changes. What fit beautifully in year one might not fit the same way in year four. And because the letters are dense and a lot of people don't read them closely, they just auto-renew and hope for the best.
He actually names that in the piece. He says they come in with the nagging feeling that they picked wrong three years ago and never checked. That's so specific. That's a real person.
We hear that. Someone who made a decision under pressure, did the best they could with what they understood at the time, and has been quietly wondering ever since if they should have picked differently.
And the not-checking is its own thing, isn't it? Because going back and reopening that decision feels like admitting you got it wrong, or it feels overwhelming, so you just don't.
Or you don't know who to ask without feeling like you're walking into a sales situation. Which brings us to the other piece of the problem that Ian lays out. He says at sixty-five you have to find your own help, and you have to figure out which of the smiling people on TV and in your mailbox is actually on your side.
Oh, that is such a pointed line. And it really does get overwhelming fast. The TV ads, I mean, the celebrity endorsements, the toll-free numbers, the urgency.
And none of it tells you what's actually right for your situation. It's all designed to get you to call. That's what it's optimized for. Not your outcome, the call.
So when Ian describes the workshop they're putting on, he literally calls it the person down the hall, put back. I thought that was such a clean way to frame what good Medicare guidance is supposed to feel like.
And the details of how they're doing it matter here. This is a public library event. October 2nd, the day after the official 2027 Medicare information comes out on October 1st. So they're walking in with the actual current numbers, not last year's.
Two locations, right? Walk us through those.
Foothills Library in Glendale at ten-thirty in the morning, and Mustang Library in Scottsdale at two-thirty in the afternoon. Both on Friday October 2nd. And there's no cost to attend.
And the piece mentions that the people running this have been doing exactly this since 2001. That's a long time.
It is. And I think that matters for the trust question Ian raises. When you're trying to figure out who is actually on your side, longevity is something. People who have been having these conversations in public libraries for over two decades are not operating the same way as a call center that spun up last enrollment season.
He's also very intentional about what he says nobody is doing at this event. He says nobody is selling anything.
Educational only. Which I think is exactly the environment where someone can actually ask the question they were embarrassed to ask. His words again. He specifically invites people to bring the embarrassing question, the letter they didn't understand, the nagging feeling about the decision they made years ago.
That's something a lot of people get and quietly put in a drawer rather than admit they don't know what they're looking at.
And the thing is, those letters are confusing by nature. They're compliance documents. They're not designed to be read by a lay person at the kitchen table. So the confusion isn't a sign that someone isn't smart enough. It's a sign that the document wasn't written for them.
I want to make sure people know how to get there if this is their area. The article has a registration link and a phone number.
You can register at 123easymedicare.com slash medicare-workshop, all one word, or you can call 877-220-1089. And again, there's no cost. The event is put on by 123EasyMedicare, which is a brand of American Retirement Advisors.
I want to go back to something Ian says near the end, because I think it's the heart of what he's trying to do with this piece. He describes what he wants for people who come to the workshop. He says walk in carrying it, walk out knowing exactly what your next step is, and rest easy that night the way you used to when HR had your back.
That is the goal. Not to make Medicare simple, because it isn't simple, but to give someone the clarity and the confidence that they have a next step they understand and trust.
And that feeling of, I know what I'm doing and why I'm doing it, that is not a small thing. That's the thing that lets people sleep.
It's also something that doesn't happen automatically. Ian's whole point is that at work, it happened for you without you even noticing. Now you have to go get it. You have to seek out the equivalent of that HR person and that broker who threw out the bad ones. That person doesn't come to your door.
So for someone listening right now who is maybe a year or two away from sixty-five, or already on Medicare and has been wondering if they got it right, what does Ian's piece suggest about the smartest move?
Show up. That's really it. He says bring the fear. Bring the letter you didn't understand. You don't have to have done any homework first. You don't have to know the terminology. You walk in with the question and you let people who have been doing this since 2001 work through it with you. You're not alone in the room, and the specific questions about exactly how the rules apply to your situation, those are best answered in person by someone who can look at your actual circumstances. Our team at American Retirement Advisors does that every day, and if there are details that are specific to your county or your drug plan that you're not sure about, that is exactly the kind of thing worth writing down and bringing to them.
I think one of the things Ian's piece does quietly is give people permission to not have figured this out on their own. The complexity isn't a personal failure. It's structural. It is genuinely hard, it was designed by a government, it involves hundreds of plans and changing rules and annual re-enrollment, and you were never given a training manual.
And yet somehow the culture around it suggests that a capable adult should be able to sort it out. Which adds shame to the confusion. People feel like they should know, so they don't ask, so they stay confused, so they stay anxious. Ian's piece is trying to break that loop.
And the loop has real consequences. If you're overpaying by several hundred dollars a month on a supplement plan because you didn't know the coverage was identical across carriers, that is real money. Over a year, over a decade of retirement.
Or if you're in an Advantage plan that looked great on paper but your specialist isn't in the network, that's not just money. That's disrupted care. The stakes are high in both directions, financial and medical.
Okay, for the person who is not in the Phoenix area, who can't make it to Glendale or Scottsdale on October 2nd, what does Ian's framework suggest for them?
Find your equivalent of the person down the hall. That's it. Find someone whose actual job it is to sort this for you, who is accountable to you and not to an insurance company, and who will still be there if something goes sideways. What that looks like in terms of specific resources in every county and state, I'd honestly put that question directly to our advisors, because the landscape varies enough that I'd rather they answer that precisely than I give a general answer that doesn't fit your situation.
I think that's really good advice. And the number is in the article if you want to reach the team directly: 877-220-1089.
Worth saving. Even if the workshop isn't the right fit, the question is worth asking out loud somewhere.
Ian ends the piece with a simple line. Happy Labor Day, come get your facts. And I think that's exactly the right spirit. Labor Day is supposed to be about honoring the work people did over a lifetime. Part of what you earned from all that work is the chance to have a retirement that feels secure. And a piece of that security is knowing your health coverage is actually right for you. That's not a small thing. That's a really big thing.
It's the foundation. If you don't feel confident about your health coverage, it colors everything else. The financial decisions, the planning, the peace of mind. Get that piece right and everything else has a better floor under it.
So if you are anywhere near the Phoenix area, both of those locations Eddie just mentioned are worth circling on your calendar. He gave you the link and the phone number, so jot those down if you haven't already. No cost, real information, and a team with the kind of deep experience we were talking about earlier -- these are not people who just learned this last year. You can walk in carrying the question you haven't been able to ask out loud. And wherever you are, if Medicare is weighing on you, please don't sit with that alone. Find your person down the hall. You've earned the right to understand what you have.