| In the Medicare world… today begins total chaos. To use a metaphor my Gulf Coast friends will understand… the storm has just reached land, and we are bracing for a 8-week period of a Medicare hurricane.Stay patient with us 🙂 Here’s the Agenda
Bracing for Medicare in 2026Every year has changes with Advantage plans, Part D drug plans, and supplement plan cost changes. 2026 just happens to be more changes than I’ve seen while in this space – both for you, the Medicare beneficiary, as well as the agent/broker community. I have four videos that go over these changes. This last one (#4) is for those with standalone Part D drug plans and it shows you how to find the lowest-cost plan for 2026. I am still waiting for the Government to officially announce the 2026 Social Security COLA amount as well as 2026 Medicare premiums, deductibles, and IRMAA thresholds. As soon as that is released, I’ll have updates for everyone 🙂 Please connect with your agents early. We can get through this together 🙂 Supplement Rate Increases Spreadsheet My newsletter friends here were the first to use this spreadsheet that shows what people entered as their Supplement rate increases. The average rate increase is a 17.49% 😬 Thank you to all who helped here. |
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Book Recommendation |
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The Splendid and the Vile I’m a sucker for WWII history books. This book is less a biography of Winston Churchill, and more a collection of verified accounts of the events going on during the war, Churchill’s decision-making process and the people surrounding him who influenced those decisions. I can only read WWII books every so often because they get pretty heavy and dark. I am always humbled by the realities of what people had to endure during this time. The fear, bravery, and tragedies that everyone had to experience. Words of Wisdom – On The Lighter SideThe past few words of wisdom entries have been more intense/emotional. I’m going to lighten things up a bit with some observations about food and the packaging of food that grind my gears. Hopefully those who are newer to this newsletter are okay with me showing my goofy side… My life revolves around food – mostly food that isn’t good for me – and these are my top 3 worst food packages to open (in order from worst to absolute worstest). 3. Drink Mixes Like the single-packet ones from… I’m spacing on the brand because we call them “purple drink”… hold on, I need to get up and go see what it is… … I’m back. Crystal Light. Or Celsius… or any of those little packets that are already tiny and have the little perforations that look like someone just took the smallest needle ever and poked 3 microscopic holes in the side of these things that do absolutely nothing. And if your fingers have any moisture whatsoever when trying to open one of those… forgeddaboudit. Just not happening. Can we use our brains to think about this practically for a half a millisecond? You are filling something up with water, or have already filled something up with water, or have unscrewed the cap on something with water before you are trying to open one of these flavor packets… so your fingers are pretty much ALWAYS wet to begin this task. This leaves you gnawing on the end of this flavor packet – a habit that has prompted your dentist to ask every 6 months why your teeth are all jacked up in this one place where you are gnawing on food packaging. And when the drink packet finally does burst open in your mouth, the flavor dust that is meant to be diluted in 6 gallons of water now bursts directly into your mouth, with dust plumes going straight into your nose, giving a concentrated shot of flavor to your senses that leaves your eyes watering and your wife asking if you’re on drugs. Just an overall poor design here. 1/10. 2. Bagged Cereal Gotta check the brand again… hold on… … Malt-O-Meal. These have the opposite problem of the drink mixes. The bag is huge. The perforations are huge. The pull area to tear open the plastic keeping you from your delicious Coco-Roos has plenty of surface area for you to get enough fingerpad traction, even if your fingers are smothered in baby oil (don’t ask). There is a zip-lock design with these big, fun letters that say: YAY! Except… the zip-lock design only spans about 33% of the bag. And the perforation part spans 99% of the bag. The perforations over the 33% of the bag are fine. As you tear away the perforated top part of these bags, no matter how gingerly, it always splits PAST the zip-lock part and opens the rest of the bag to the big, bad world. And the entire purpose of the zip-lock feature is completely defeated because 33% of the back is zip-locked closed, but the other 67% of the bag is torn to shreds with no hope of resealing unless you have a hot glue gun or a hair straightener that will melt the cereal bag plastic into itself. And… somehow… the perforation part somehow has extra reinforcement on that last 1%, making it so strong, that you could hang off a 1,000 foot cliff by this cereal bag shard of plastic with complete confidence that your life is safe because the strength of this thing is plenty to keep you from falling to your death. So we got THAT thing always dangling from the end of our cereal bag, fighting your hands every time you try to get some cereal. You need a chain saw or machete to amputate this last bit of bag packaging off so your OCD isn’t on high-alert for the rest of your life. Now, we used to have a spout (the 33%) that was never big enough in the first place to pour out the amount of cereal I want at the flow rate I desire. But this problem was solved by the bad bag design leaving 100% of the bag open for an unlimited flow rate of the cereal – which… there is such a thing as too much flow rate when we’re talking about cereal. The “resealable” advertising is now totally false because I ripped past the zip-lock threshold, and my two dogs learn that they have easy access to the chocolate cereal, chowing down on all of it that leads to all kinds of NSFW problems around the house as they pound a garbage-bag size amount of Coco-Roos. Triple threat of bad design. 0/10 1. Last, and definitely the least when it comes to my affection for this food packaging design… shredded cheese bags. Problem number 1 There is the little red line at the top that is supposed to make this tear away part easier. Cool, cool, cool. Love colors. BUT THERE’S NO PERFORATION! I can’t grab the end of this red line and pull if there is no perforation! And the distance between the red line saying “tear here” and the zip-lock portion is about 1/1000th of an inch (even though there is no weak point in this bag to start), so if I go all Hulk-mode on this, I’m tearing underneath the zip-lock portion which results in me not being able to seal the cheese bag again. Cheese is exposed to the air as it stays out in the refrigerator. Cheese dries out. Cheese gets moldy. Everything is ruined. So the ONLY other option is to go back to the tried-and-true gnawing technique. This creates a weak point in the tear away part with the red line but introduces a similar problem to the drink mix issue. Tiny surface area, wet fingers because your wet mouth has been all over this part of the bag gnawing it open, no traction. You’re incredibly frustrated at this point. More so than any political meme or news bulletin. More frustrated than you’ve ever been at your children. More frustrated than anyone has ever been at any point in history. All you wanted to do was make a quesadilla, or sprinkle a little cheese on your omelet that is now burning in the pan on the stove, and you can’t get in this damn cheese bag open. Finally… after allowing evaporation to do its thing, your saliva remnants on the bag are gone, and you get ahold of the red line enough to tear it off the cheese bag. The end is near. Or is it? Problem #2 You take an insanely long time to split the bag top because the two sides are super thin and you can’t seem to separate them with your adult-sized fingers. “Come on… come on… YES!” You grab both sides of the bag to open the zip-lock portion… the only thing between you and cheese heaven… You pull gently (maybe not so gently because of the hell you’ve been through to get to this point)… and one side of the zip-lock mechanism inevitably separates entirely from the bag, meaning the bag is open, but both sides of the zip-lock invention are still stuck together over on one side of the bag with no connection to side 2. A critical necessity for the full function of a zip-lock idea. No more zip-lock feature. You sprinkle your cheese in shame. You roll the bag top over itself as many times as you can. If you’re lucky, you have a dirty rubber band laying around somewhere to keep it rolled up, and you throw the bag in the fridge. Problem #3 Your children pray that they are adopted instead of the offspring of this loser. You eat your burned omelet with cheese in shame out in the garage. -1,000/10 The Results If you’ve made it to this point, you’re probably either like: “OMG, this is 100,000,000% true. Erik should be our leader into the future.” Or… you’re like, “Erik… uh…just use scissors…” 1st group of people: We should be friends. We understand each other. 2nd group of t even know what to say… Scissors?! Okay, so now you’re saying we… evolved human beings… we need scissors to enjoy caffeine laced purple drinks? You’re saying that we… Americans living in 2025… almost 2026… we need sharpened steel to enjoy sweet, chocolaty Coco-Roos? You’re saying that we… an advanced, intelligent civilization with thousands of years of ingenuity… and a space station… and the internet with ChatGPT… we need razor blades attached to colorful finger-hole-handles to gain access to the wonderful invention of cheese?! No. I refuse to live in a world with those kinds of barriers to freedom. I’m letting Crystal Light, Malt-O-Meal, and all cheese companies that offer shredded cheese know where I stand on such an important topic. Feel free to add any other packaging disasters to the list. Back to the Serious Part I lean on humor to get me through difficult times. Thank you for taking the time to read this far. I hope you have a wonderful month, a wonderful AEP, and I’ll see you in the next newsletter 🙂 Erik |
