What to know about your "Welcome to Medicare" visit

Some people might say, why do I even need that if I'm going to the doctor regularly for whatever health condition that I have? You just read my mind.

For those of us who keep up on our annual visits, why do we even need to do this welcome to Medicare thing?

So if somebody has been seeing a primary care doc and you're seeing that same primary care doc in Medicare, well, then this might feel pretty normal to you.

This might feel like the annual exam that you have every year.

You go in, you check in with your doctors, you go over screenings.

We recognize that some people haven't had that check-in.

And sometimes when you're going just for medical conditions, for the diabetes or hypertension, Sometimes we forget to check in on the preventive stuff.

And so this is a time that specifically set aside to say, hey, yep, I know you've got whatever medical conditions.

We want to make sure that we are also paying attention to the prevention.

Are we up to date on those vaccines? How's the hearing and vision? How's your mental health? Checking it on all of the things.

So these are actually things we probably should be doing during our annual checkups, but a lot of us just aren't.

We're just dealing with what seem like the biggest issues.

Right, exactly.

Sometimes, you know, the thing that's right in front of us, we always say, well, how come we didn't prevent it? This is actually saying, let's take time to make sure that we can try

and do some of that

prevention.

Well, I'm sure that a lot of people listening to this episode, if they're not quite at the welcome to Medicare age yet, if they're in the lead up to that, maybe they'll take away from our conversation things they can do during their regular annual visits before the Medicare starts, hopefully.

Exactly.

You don't have to wait to Medicare to start having these conversations with your doctor.

All right.

So if anyone already has private insurance that they feel happy with, is there any reason that they should still go to the welcome to Medicare visit?

So that's an important thing.

And again, it kind of gets back to that timing.

So that welcome to Medicare visit is only covered within the first 12 months.

And so, you know, years fly by quickly.