Medicare questions we answerMedicare questions we answer on the phone every week

Usually not, if your coverage comes from an employer with twenty or more employees and you’re still actively working there. Part A is free for most people, so many people take it and leave Part B alone until they retire.

Under twenty employees, retiree coverage, or COBRA changes the answer — and getting it wrong carries a lifetime penalty on your Part B premium, not a one-off fine. If you contribute to a health savings account, that changes it again.

Call us with your employer size before you decide. It is a five-minute conversation and it is the single most expensive thing on this page to get wrong.

If you are still working at 65

With a Medicare Supplement plan, yes — any provider in the country who accepts Medicare, with no network and no referrals.

With a Medicare Advantage plan it depends on the plan’s network, which is county-specific and changes year to year. We check your actual doctors and your actual prescriptions against the plan before you enroll, not after.

Neither. It’s a genuine fork, and the right side of it depends on your doctors, your prescriptions, how much you travel, and how you feel about surprise bills versus a predictable monthly premium.

Know this early: the window where you can buy a Medigap plan without answering health questions does not stay open. Advantage plans ask no health questions at any point. That asymmetry is why the decision at 65 is harder to reverse than it looks.

Both roads, side by side

It’s a short form recording which product types you agreed to discuss, and CMS requires it before we talk about a specific Medicare Advantage or Part D plan. It is permission to have a conversation — it enrolls you in nothing and commits you to nothing.

If you only want to talk about Medicare Supplement, no Scope of Appointment is needed at all. Some agents ask for one anyway; the rule doesn’t.

You can decline any topic on it, and you can change your mind during the appointment.

What the form covers

Yes, and Colorado is a better state to be in for this than most. Colorado regulation requires every Medigap carrier selling here to offer an applicant under 65 every policy they currently sell, with no health questions, during a six-month window that starts when your Part B does. Most states require none of that.

They are allowed to charge more for it, and they generally do. So what usually decides this is whether the premium works for you, not whether anybody can turn you away — and sometimes the answer is a Medicare Advantage plan or a Medicare Savings Program instead. We will tell you when it is.

If you have both Medicare and Medicaid, or you might qualify for Extra Help with drug costs, say so when you call. Those change the math considerably and people routinely don’t know they qualify.

Medicare under 65, in full

No. Carriers pay brokers a commission that’s built into the premium and set by regulation, so your price is the same whether you enroll through us, through another agent, or entirely on your own. There is no Grove fee at any point.

The commission exists whether or not you use a broker. Not using one doesn’t get you a discount — it just means nobody is on your side of the table.

For Medicare Advantage and Part D, no — CMS caps what a broker can be paid and the cap applies to every carrier alike. It exists for exactly the reason you’d hope: so that the plan that pays us best and the plan that suits you best are not different plans.

Medicare Supplement and marketplace commissions are not capped the same way and do vary a little between carriers. So ask us. We will tell you what a plan pays us, and if the right recommendation is a plan that pays us less, that is the recommendation you’ll get.

How we’re paid, in full

For individual and family coverage, yes. Grove is a certified Connect for Health Colorado broker, so every plan on the Colorado exchange is one we can enroll you in — there is nothing on that marketplace we are keeping back from you.

For Medicare, no broker does, and anyone who says otherwise should be treated carefully. We’re appointed with the major Colorado carriers, and the required disclosure on our Medicare disclosures page says exactly which of them we represent.

If the right plan for you is one we can’t sell, we’ll tell you that and point you at Medicare.gov, 1-800-MEDICARE, or Connect for Health Colorado. We would rather lose the sale than have you in the wrong plan for a year.

Read the required disclosures

No. The same advisor stays on your file. Plans change every year — networks drop doctors, drug formularies move, premiums move — and the point of using a broker is having somebody who notices.

We check in before each Annual Enrollment Period and tell you whether your plan still fits. Sometimes the answer is that it does and there’s nothing to do.

No. We do not do group or employer-sponsored coverage, and we do not set up ICHRAs. Saying so now is cheaper for you than finding out after a meeting.

Two things we can still do. If you are the owner and you buy your own coverage, that is exactly what we do — a lot of our marketplace clients are self-employed. And if you already have an offer at work and cannot tell whether it rules your household out of marketplace help, that is a real question with a real answer and we will run it with you.

Coverage when you are self-employed

Yes, and it doesn’t change your coverage. Moving your agent of record is paperwork between us and the carrier — your plan, your doctors, your premium, and your card all stay exactly as they are.

You do not need a reason and you do not need to tell your current agent anything.

We do not sell your information. Not to lead brokers, not to other agencies, not to anyone. The tool we use to count visits cannot tell us who you are. We do use Google’s advertising tag to learn whether an ad led to a booking or a call, and it never runs on the enrollment worksheet. The booking calendar on one page is Cal.com’s software and brings its own cookies; the privacy policy lists every one of them.

The Medicare and marketplace lead business largely runs on selling contact details, which is why the phone starts ringing after you fill in a comparison form somewhere. Tell us to stop contacting you and we stop. Once is enough.

Our privacy policy

Yes. Plenty of our appointments have an adult child on the call, and that is a good idea rather than an imposition — two people hear more than one.

For anything that needs a signature, someone can act on your behalf with your authorization, and the paperwork records that they did. Have them join the call, or put them on speaker.

Some of it, and we would rather be straight about which. We can work with an interpreter or a family member you bring, for as long as it takes. TTY 711 reaches us through the free national relay service.

What we do not have is a bilingual advisor on staff, an interpreter service on retainer, translation of documents into any other language, or braille and large-print production of our own. If that is what you need, Connect for Health Colorado and 1-800-MEDICARE both staff interpreters in many languages at no cost, and we will point you there rather than waste your time.

Asking for any of this changes nothing about what you can enroll in or what it costs.

What we can and cannot do

Less than you think. Your ZIP code, a list of your prescriptions with doses, and the names of the doctors you want to keep will get us most of the way.

You do not need to have read anything first, and you do not need to know what Part C is. That is our job.