If you already have your Medicare Part A benefit activated, odds are you’re older than 65, right?

Which means you more than likely continued to keep working from age 65 until now (either by choice ‘cause you like your job, or by circumstance ‘cause you needed the money).

Either way, when declining signing up for your Medicare Part B, more often than not, it's because you remained actively employed and kept your Employer Group Healthcare Plan provided to you as an employee.

I will go ahead and assume at the time you made that decision, you would have checked, and double checked, the healthcare coverage through your employer met, or exceeded, what the Federal Government classifies as “credible coverage.”

And hopefully, when you turned 65, you also would have pre-filed your “Proof of Credible Coverage” form, which will make life much easier for you signing up for Part B now, later in life.

If you did NOT do this, you will have a few more hoops to jump through to get out of paying the costly lifetime late enrollment penalties.

Your process to apply for Part B if you already have Part A looks like this:

STEP 1.
Request and fill out the official CMS “Medicare Part B (Medical Coverage)” application form. Fairly straight-forward to complete this correctly. Just fill in the blanks from top to bottom and sign the back page.

STEP 2.
Submit your “Medicare Part B (Medical Coverage) application form with by fax or snail mail. These are sent to the central processing office in Kansas City where your zip code of residence will be looked up, and your application will be re-routed back to whatever local Social Security representative is responsible for processing and approval. (This time-wasting inefficiency is why it takes 2-3 months for the big, dumb bureaucratic government to approve applications.)

STEP 3.
Once your “Medicare Part B (Medical Coverage) application form is assigned for processing and approval, it will trigger a lookback to the original date your Medicare Part A benefits went active.

Your “Medicare Part B (Medical Coverage) application will be put on hold and into a pending status temporarily. You will then be sent a “Late Enrollment Penalty” letter by U.S. Postal mail. Think of this like the Government assuming you are guilty, and now you must prove your innocence to get out of paying a permanent late penalty for life.

STEP 4.
Once you receive your “Late Enrollment Penalty” letter, you will want request a secondary, separate CMS “Request For Employment Information” form to verify you did, in fact, remain employed, with health insurance from your Employer Group Healthcare Plan, and your coverage as an employee was considered “creditable.”

This “Request For Employment Information” form must be completed and signed by an HR Rep, or company official, from your employer, detailing your work history and hire date at the company, the coverage they have provided you, and the benefit years that you received healthcare coverage. You cannot sign this form.

STEP 5.
Once your HR Rep has returned your “Request For Employment Information” form back to you, you will submit this directly to the Social Security representative assigned to your application. Once received, your “Medicare Part B (Medical Coverage) will be moved back into processing status, awaiting final approval for the effective date you want for your Part B benefits to begin.

Be aware, you are not allowed to choose a private Medicare insurance plan (Medicare Advantage or Medicare Supplement / Medigap) until your Part B benefits are active, so pay attention to the fact, often times, applying for Medicare Part B later in life, after age 65, can have significant delays if you do not submit all your application forms early enough before your Employer Group Healthcare Plan will be discontinued after your retirement date.

It is very, very common for people to decide on their retirement date, give their 2-week notice or 30-day notice, and then start thinking about their transition over to Medicare.

This is not smart.

If you wait to the last minute like this, you will run into a real dangerous risk of a lapse in health insurance coverage due to the processing delays I’ve mentioned above. You may be left having to buy costly COBRA coverage to bridge the gap because of poor and improper planning (which, by the way, Medicare does not consider COBRA to be “creditable” coverage, so this will open up another potential problem with being assessed a permanent late penalty for a different reason).
​
​** NOTE** The good news is, you don’t have to do anything with Medicare on your own. As the one and ONLY approved Certified Starting Medicare Specialist™️ for Erie County, my office does offer the benefit of Medicare SmartApp application services on-site where we are authorized to, not only complete and submit your Federal Medicare applications FOR YOU --- FREE, but we also have the ability to speed up the time it takes for approval, shortcutting the typical 2-3 months down to 2-3 weeks, sometimes as fast as 2-3 days. Let me take away the stress of you trying to tackle anything with Medicare on you own! We are always happy to help in any way we can, you just have to ask…

​Due to our reputation and popularity being voted #1 best Medicare planning service in the area for the last 6 years in a row, appointments are limited and fill up fast. To see if you qualify to use the free, nationally-recognized and 5-star rated, Medicare SmartStart Program™️ I manage, call my local office in Clarence right now at (716) 833-0252. (Really the only people I can't help and the ones who never call).