Medicare Open Enrollment Is Starting. Here’s How to Navigate the Ad Blitz.

If you’re enrolled in Medicare, you might want to turn off your television this time of year.

In the weeks ahead, the airwaves will be flooded with advertisements promoting insurance plans during Medicare’s open enrollment period, which will start on Sunday and end Dec. 7.

During open enrollment, you can make changes to your Part D prescription drug or Medicare Advantage coverage, and it’s important to review your current selections. Drug plans often change the prices and terms for covering medications — and your needs may have changed in the past year. Medicare Advantage plans can add or remove providers in their network at any time, and many include prescription drug coverage that should be reviewed.

But government officials and researchers have voiced rising concerns about the way these plans are marketed to more than 66 million Americans covered by Medicare, considering the complexity — and importance — of enrollment decisions.

A new study by KFF, a nonprofit organization focused on health policy, examined 1,200 television ads promoting Medicare that aired during the 2022 enrollment season and found that most had promoted Medicare Advantage plans. Drew Altman, KFF’s chief executive, described the blitz as “annual marketing madness” that can confuse and mislead people trying to make complex choices about their coverage.

The marketing practices of health insurers and brokers included improper inferences that the ads are government-sponsored, and messages urging eligible Medicare beneficiaries not to “miss out” on benefits to which they’re entitled, leaving viewers with the incorrect impression that traditional Medicare is incomplete.

And research by the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit research group focused on health care issues, found that as many as 19 percent of Medicare beneficiaries had reported receiving phone calls or seeing ads that would be considered fraud, including offers of “special discounts” for signing up within a certain time frame. Ten percent reported receiving calls asking for their Medicare or Social Security number before plan details would be given.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (C.M.S.), which runs Medicare, has moved to strengthen its regulation of plan marketing. Starting with this enrollment season, C.M.S. will require all television ads to be approved in advance and add new messaging standards for all forms of marketing — including direct mail, email and phone outreach.

The effects of the crackdown remain to be seen, said Tricia Neuman, senior vice president of KFF. “We’ll have to wait and see what the ads look like when they start to air,” she said. “In some cases, the guidelines for insurers are fairly clear, but in other cases they may be more ambiguous.”

With that warning in mind, let’s consider the changes you can make to your Medicare coverage during fall enrollment, new federal cost controls on prescription drug plans — and how you can cut through the marketing noise and make smart buying decisions.

What can you do?

If you are enrolled in traditional Medicare (Parts A and B), paired with a Medigap supplemental plan, there’s no need to review that coverage. But Part D and Medicare Advantage selections should be rechecked annually, said Frederic Riccardi, president of the Medicare Rights Center, an advocacy and consumer organization.

“It’s important to look at how your prescription drug coverage may be changing,” he said. “Will your costs go up or down? Will the drugs you’re taking be covered, or will they be on a different tier of coverage? Is a more affordable Part D plan available?”

It’s also possible to switch between Medicare Advantage and traditional fee-for-service Medicare during the fall period. Advantage plans offer lower upfront premium costs because of their all-in-one design, but they generally confine you to in-network providers, whom they are free to add and drop. And this year, some hospitals and health systems are dropping Advantage plans, citing problems with denials of care and slow payment.

Medicare recipients’ out-of-pocket costs in Advantage plans can be substantial in years when their care needs are high. This year, the average out-of-pocket limit is $4,835 for in-network services and $8,659 for both in-network and out-of-network services, according to KFF.

Traditional Medicare offers access to any health care provider who participates in the program. But if you want to switch from Advantage to traditional Medicare, pay careful attention to a critical component you will need: supplemental coverage that protects you from potentially high out-of-pocket costs.

Traditional Medicare has no annual out-of-pocket limit, which could leave you on the hook for thousands of dollars in co-pays and…