Julie Appleby

Last year was 3 million, which was a big shocker.

And so my colleague, Emily Pisaqueta, talked to a lot of people, people who are in that situation and people who are helping people in that situation, community workers, health insurance brokers, all the rest.

And one thing that she learned was that in that case, at least in Minnesota, having your Medicare Advantage plan end gave you a little bit of like a get out of jail free card.

You could go back to traditional Medicare and buy a supplement and they couldn't turn you down.

However...

What people told us was, for the most part, people didn't feel like they really had the financial option to go back to traditional Medicare because those supplements were so expensive for them.

And as our colleague Julie Appleby has been chronicling, they're getting much more expensive year over year.

So that was a surprise to us.

And we have spoken with folks in a dozen states, rural places like Vermont and North Dakota, states with rural and urban centers like Maryland and Minnesota, about how it all went down last year and what we can take away for this year.

My colleague, Emily Pizzacretta, and our awesome summer intern, Lynn Barbera, made those calls.

And Emily, you called that experience eye-opening.

Yeah.

But just beware that it might take me a couple weeks to get back to you.

Instead of going to everyone's house, she set up office hours at a coffee shop to be able to see as many people as possible.

Meanwhile, Kelly Jo Greiner and her colleagues at the state's Medicare hotline were scrambling too.

We had wait times of