Doing nothing is a choice, and the form says so

Wendell here. Fridays are the big system.

At the plant, drawings got revised. The new print always came with a change block in the corner. A ruled list of what had moved since the last issue, dates against each line.

The block existed because nobody reads a whole drawing twice. You read the block. You see a dimension went from four inches to four and a quarter. You work from that. A man who skipped it and worked from memory built to the old print, and we found out later at a bad moment.

There's a change block coming to your mailbox this month, and most people throw it away.

What arrives by 30 September

If you're in a Medicare Advantage plan, or a standalone Part D drug plan, your insurer has to send you an Annual Notice of Change before this month is out. Original Medicare doesn't send one. It doesn't change that way.

It's a thick envelope and it looks like the marketing that turns up alongside it. It isn't marketing. It's a federal form with an approval number on it, and the plan doesn't get to decide what goes in.

What it holds is a side by side, this year's plan against next year's. Premium, deductible, maximum out of pocket. The drug list, and which tier your medicines sit on. The provider network. Any new step where the plan has to approve something before you can have it.

What the rule actually says

I went and read the regulation rather than an article about it, which I'd recommend to anybody.

“The ANOC is a standardized marketing material… Must send for enrollee receipt no later than September 30 of each year.”

42 CFR § 422.2267(e)(3)

Read the first half of that again. The most consequential document your plan sends all year is filed, in the government's own regulation, as marketing material.

That's why it looks like the marketing. It's the same category.

Standardised means the plan can't rewrite it. The rule lists what a plan is allowed to change and the list is short: fill in the variable fields, correct a grammatical error, add a customer service number, add the plan name or logo, drop sections that don't apply to that plan type. That's the lot. The words are the agency's.

There's a specification for the type as well. Twelve point, Times New Roman or equivalent. Somebody wrote that down, the way somebody writes down a torque figure.

And the line on the envelope

This is the part I sat back from.

The same regulation tells plans what has to be printed on the outside of the envelope when they mail you something about your current plan. The required wording is: “Important [Insert Plan Name] information.”

So the envelope says it's important, because a rule says it has to. And it goes in the bin with the rest, because everything in that week's post says it's important.

Four things, not the whole document

Don't read it front to back. It runs to dozens of pages and most of it hasn't changed. Find the comparison columns, and check these four.

The window

From 15 October to 7 December you can switch. Whatever you choose starts on 1 January. After 7 December you're generally in for the year.

So the notice lands at the end of this month. You get a fortnight to read it and eight weeks to act. That's a generous window by the standards of anything else in these letters, and it closes completely.

Wendell