10 Medicare COVID-19 Benefits Facts You Should Know

The Medicare plan annual enrollment period is set to start Oct. 15. COVID-19 has put everything in a reality scrambler, and just about every entity that ever existed, from big insurers, to giant web brokers, to newly discovered microbes from the atmosphere of Venus seems to want a piece of the action. (Related: 10 Medicare FAQs You Should Know) If you're a live human who's been selling Medicare plans since the old days, before the pandemic started, one weapon you have against the bots and the call centers is live-human charm. Another is information beyond what the other folks have in their flow charts. Here are 10 new facts about Medicare coverage and COVID-19 benefits, drawn from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) website. Of course: Given how quickly everything is changing, and how complicated this is, verify any information provided here with your own compliance people, and with your carriers. Here are the CMS pages that we used, and that you might consider bookmarking for your own use:

• The main CMS website: http://www.cms.gov
• The Medicare & Coronavirus page, and sites linked to that page: https://www.medicare.gov/medicare-coronavirus
• The Preliminary Medicare COVID-19 Data Snapshot page, which covers data received by Aug. 14: https://www.cms.gov/research-statistics-data-systems/preliminary-medicare-covid-19-data-snapshot