Medicare 101

It’s up to us to keep the Medicare rhetoric based in reality. Do you know its benefits and shortcomings? Can you distinguish between what Medicare covers and your supplemental coverage? Not on Medicare and need a refresher?

Here is a  link to a great 101 on Medicare – it is a set of slides with voice narration. After less than 17 minutes, you’ll have an idea of what Medicare really is when our decision-makers start talking about policy changes.

Let’s not repeat the summer town halls of  2009. Congressional members are back in their home districts for meetings, and some specifically about Medicare. If you do your homework, you can help your friends and family understand what’s at stake for Medicare and the millions of Americans who depend on it.

Even if you are well-versed on Medicare policy, it’s still great to do the Medicare 101 as a refresher, and you can go deeper with this great fact sheet about the deficit reduction proposals being discussed in Congress (a PDF put together by the Kaiser Family Foundation).

There is agreement that Medicare needs to change; the question is what direction those changes will take.