Last month I told you to watch for Medicare's 2027 drug-plan numbers. They're out, and on average they didn't do what I said they would. Here's the honest version, and the letter that matters more than any average.
In this issue:
• 2027 Medicare premiums, and the letter to open
• On your radar: centenarians’ children, and grandparents
• Worth knowing: when a friend becomes the caregiver
• Slice of life: 5,000 days on Mars
📰 The Big Story
Next year's drug-plan prices, and the letter that matters
The short version: Medicare expects the average drug plan to cost about the same next year, around $36 a month. But that's an average. Your own plan can still raise its price, change how it covers your drugs, or change which pharmacies it prefers.
A correction. On September 8 I told you a temporary federal discount was ending and would push these premiums up. On average, it barely did.
In Medicare Advantage, the average premium is going down, from about $14 a month to $12.
What to do this week: find the letter from your plan called the Annual Notice of Change. It lists what's changing next year. If it hasn't come, call the number on your member card. Check four things:
The monthly premium
The deductible (it starts over every January 1)
Each drug you take, against the plan's 2027 drug list
Your pharmacy, and in Advantage, your doctors
Then, between October 15 and December 7, compare plans at medicare.gov/plan-compare. Type that address in yourself: the FTC warns that scammers sometimes pay to appear at the top of search results. For free, unbiased help, your state's SHIP counselors can walk you through it: shiphelp.org.
Handling a parent's plan? The plan may not talk to you unless your parent is on the line or has put you on file, so ask for the plan's authorization form.
🔍 On Your Radar
🧬 Long life runs in families, and so does staying healthy. Children of people who lived to 100 tend to stay healthier for longer themselves. In one study of about 2,300 of them, they had a 42% lower risk of dying than people whose parents died at 85 or younger, and they got high blood pressure about five years later. That held up even after accounting for habits like smoking and diet. And high blood pressure on its own doesn’t rule out a very long life: a Stanford study of nearly 734,000 people who reached 100 concluded it is “compatible with extreme longevity.”
🏠 Six quick facts about grandparents. Pew pulled these together for Grandparents Day:
Two-thirds of Americans 65 and older are grandparents.
The average grandparent has six grandchildren.
About 1 in 5 spent at least 100 hours caring for a grandchild over two years, roughly an hour a week.
8% of U.S. kids live in a home where a grandparent is the head of the household, most often with both grandparents.
7 in 10 grandparents 65 and older are in touch with their grandkids at least a few times a month, in person, by phone or by text.
Among adults with a living grandparent, about a third say they're extremely or very close to them. Among Black Americans, it's about half.
💡 Worth Knowing
When the caregiver isn't family
KFF Health News ran a piece in September on a kind of caregiver that rarely gets counted: the people who step in aren't always relatives. The neighbor picking up prescriptions. The friend from church who drives to appointments. The former coworker who somehow became the person the hospital calls.
It's more common than the brochures suggest, and it sits in a strange practical space. A friend can hold your hand through a diagnosis and still be told nothing by the discharge nurse. That's not because the law forbids it, but because nobody ever wrote her down.
If you're the friend in that role, you're far from alone: about 14% of older adults with health limitations named a friend or neighbor as a caregiver, roughly 2.4 million people. And if someone is doing this for you, put her name on the paperwork while it's easy: the HIPAA authorization, the emergency contact line, the healthcare proxy if it comes to that. The affection is already there. The permissions are what's missing.
📚 From the Archives
Can a Nursing Home Make You Personally Responsible for the Bill? by Benjamin Wells
If a parent is heading into a nursing home this fall, this is the piece I'd hand you before the admission packet.
Federal law prohibits a facility from requiring you to personally guarantee your mother's bill as a condition of letting her in. What it does allow is signing as a representative who agrees to pay from her funds, without incurring personal financial liability. Those five words are the whole protection. The two sit inches apart on the same form, they read almost identically to a tired person in an admissions office, and the difference is a house.
The article walks through the actual wording, line by line, so you can spot which one you're being handed. If there's a stack of paperwork in your near future, read it before you're across the desk from someone with a pen.
☕ Slice of Life
5,000 days on Mars
The Curiosity rover passed its 5,000th Martian day at the end of August. A Martian day runs about 40 minutes longer than ours, so the team on Earth has spent years drifting in and out of sync with a planet that keeps its own hours.
It has also gained a kilometer of elevation since landing on the floor of Gale crater: a robot the size of a car, grinding uphill since 2012, on a mission planned for one Martian year.
Nothing about this is useful. I just think a machine that was supposed to last 669 Martian days and is still taking pictures on day 5,000 is worth a moment.
That's the week. Open the envelope before you open the averages.
Until next week,
Nino
P.S. Has your plan's 2027 letter arrived yet, and did your premium go up, down, or stay put? Hit reply with one word: up, down, same, or not yet. I'm trying to learn whether the averages match what you're actually seeing, and I read every reply.
