Health Care Benefits and Retirement

What happens to individuals when they finally decide it is time to retire. What happens to their long-term health insurance coverage that they grew so comfortable with over the past twenty-five years, thirty years, or longer? Actually, what happens to your employer base low cost health insurance really depends upon when you decided to retire.

Part of the answer to this depends on if you are officially retiring or if you are leaving long time employment to begin a business of your own. Medicare health insurance does not begin until you reach your sixty-fifth birthday. Yet, you can submit your paperwork to begin collecting Social Security with limited benefits at age sixty-two years of age.

You do have the option of trying to apply for a temporary short-term health insurance until you can find a health insurance provider that you are satisfied with, but you must understand the cost for the temporary short-term health insurance will be very expensive.

At the age of sixty-five, the employer-based health care will automatically transfer over to the Medicare program and the beneficiary will have previously filled out a questionnaire to be submitted. This way Medicare health care will have a better and more complete picture of the individual’s medical history. Medicare health care will also have a medical history on the spouse too if there has been any health insurance claims submitted over the years.

Today there are an estimated ten million to twelve million retirees with health insurance coverage as a portion of their retirement packages through their employer. This is another way to attain additional medical health care coverage to protect the individual and the spouse from catastrophic emergencies that can still occur.

Retired employees usually will be eligible for low cost health care benefits as part of their retirement package, but that will depend upon where they were employed, whom they were employed with, and how long they were employed. However, the health care coverage many of the retirees today are protected with is the following.

1. Preventive health care benefits
2. Prescription drugs
3. Some Medicare deductibles

Of course, the Medicare prescription drug coverage that passed a few years ago has changed some of the rules for health care coverage for many retirees. Yet, many of these same retirees are still able to maintain their health care benefits. In time, there will be more health insurance changes as the population grows within the senior community.