Does Colorado have a Medigap birthday rule?

No, it doesn't — and if you've been reading otherwise, you've probably been reading advice written for California or Oregon.

The birthday rule is a real protection in about a dozen states. It gives you a window each year, usually starting on your birthday, to move to an equal or lesser Medicare Supplement plan without answering a single health question. Where it exists, it turns Medigap into something you can shop annually, the way you'd shop car insurance.

Colorado never adopted one, and that raises the stakes on the decision you make at 65.

What you get instead

Your Medigap Open Enrollment Period runs six months, and it starts the month you're both 65 or older and enrolled in Part B. Inside that window, any carrier selling Medigap in Colorado has to sell you any plan they offer, at their standard rate, without asking a thing about your health.

Six months, once — and after it closes, carriers here are allowed to use medical underwriting. They can ask what conditions you have, charge you more, or turn you down.

People do underestimate that window. If you treat it as a formality on the way to shopping around, you'll find you've already done the shopping.

Why the wrong advice ranks so well

Search for "Medigap birthday rule" and you'll find clear, confident, genuinely useful articles. Most of them were written for states that have one, and none of them says "unless you live in Colorado" at the top, because they weren't written with you in mind.

The same goes for the friend who switched plans at 70 with no trouble at all. It's worth asking which state they live in before you plan around their experience.

One correction worth making

You may also read that Colorado offers a special guaranteed-issue window for people who came to Medicare through disability and are now turning 65. That window is real, but it isn't a Colorado provision — it's the federal Medigap Open Enrollment Period, and everybody gets it at 65 whether they arrived at Medicare through age or through disability.

The Colorado-specific fact actually runs the other way, and it runs in your favor. Most states leave people who reached Medicare through disability with no Medigap right at all before 65, and Colorado doesn't. State regulation requires every carrier selling Medigap here to make every policy they currently sell available to an applicant under 65, without health questions, during a six-month window that opens the first month you're enrolled in Part B — whatever your age.

They're allowed to charge more for it, and they generally do. What they can't do is turn you away. So if you've read somewhere that people under 65 can't buy a Medicare Supplement, that was written for a different state.

So are you stuck?

Not entirely, but the ways out are particular situations rather than a yearly opportunity.

You get guaranteed-issue rights in specific circumstances: your plan leaves the market, you lose certain coverage you'd been relying on, or you use a trial right in your first year on a Medicare Advantage plan. Some carriers will also underwrite you and say yes, particularly if you're in good health, and a rate increase on your current plan is a perfectly reasonable trigger to go and ask.

There's one detail buried in that which is worth more than the rest of this page to whoever it reaches: how long you have depends on who ended the coverage. If your plan ended it — canceled, not renewed, pulled out of your county — Colorado gives you six months. If you ended it, you get 63 days. Nearly every guide out there quotes the 63 days at everybody, which is how somebody ends up being told they're too late four months early.

What you shouldn't do is assume the door reopens every year, because in Colorado it doesn't.

What to do about it

If you're inside your six months right now, that fact should be driving your decision more than any premium quote. A plan that costs eight dollars a month more, from a carrier with a better rate history, is a completely different decision when you can still choose freely than it is when you can't.

And if your window closed years ago and your premium has been creeping up, the question isn't whether you're allowed to switch. It's whether you'd pass underwriting, and whether the saving survives the new plan's own increases. We'll tell you when the answer is no — finding that out from us costs nothing, where finding it out from a declined application costs you a month and a paper trail.

Tell us your birthday and your Part B start date and we can tell you exactly where you stand. No charge, no obligation.