Sorting Through Medicare Confusion

BY STEVE DINNEN

Chances are very good you will live to see age 65. Chances are even better that once you reach that milestone your (probable) glee will be tempered, perhaps a lot, by the buzz kill of selecting Medicare insurance coverage.

Yes, rich man or woman, poor man or woman—we all qualify for Medicare, though you can stall it off if you’re still working and covered by workplace insurance. But unlike employer-sponsored health insurance and its basic premise of “here’s what we’ll pay, here’s what we won’t,” Medicare is a hodgepodge of choices that can seem confusing—because they are—to people who deal with it one time in their life. And if you make the wrong call, it can be costly, or lock you into a type of coverage that may be difficult to change. Think it’s easy? Just try successfully slogging through a 132-page booklet that the Iowa Insurance Division mails or hands to people who attend a workshop on Medicare run by the helpful people at SHIIP—the Senior Health Insurance Information Program, SHIIP.Iowa.gov. (They do good work, and their information sessions are frequent—26 across the state just in August and September.)

Medicare, they’ll tell you, has many parts. Part A covers hospital charges and hospice, generally at no cost. Part B handles doctor’s office visits, outpatient services and tests, among others, and costs $170.10 and upward depending on your modified adjusted gross income. Part C, Medicare Advantage, picks up some slack from what A and B don’t cover. Part D is for drugs, and costs will vary depending on what medicines you take. Medigap has 10 different plans, which are confusingly also alphabetized and range from letters A through N.

To wade through this thicket, you'd best seek competent advice. Perhaps someone like John Bush, a self-described Medicare geek, at www.seniorsavingsservices.com, or 515-218-8022. He explains that Medicare coverage basically boils down to Medigap – also called Medicare Supplemental—or what is called Medicare Advantage (which must cover all that Parts A and B do). Both have plusses—and minuses.

Bear in mind these are insurance plans, said Janis Van Ahn (pictured above) of Health Insurance Advisor LLC in Johnston. “You have to determine your risk tolerance,” she said. Policyholders have to make a determination that “I know I’m taking on this risk.”

Like other kinds of insurance, it pays to shop around every few years. Insurer reimbursement for prescriptions change from time to time. Medicine can be quite expensive, as we all know, so even though changing Medicare coverage is not nearly as easy to an automobile policy, it’s not impossible.

Nighttime Arrivals at Des Moines Airport Create Congestion

BY STEVE DINNEN

Passenger traffic at Des Moines International Airport is bouncing back to pre-pandemic levels, and sometimes it shows. And the end of the evening often is not a calming time there. From 10 p.m. to midnight, an average of 10 commercial aircraft land, disgorging 1,000-plus travelers who then have to fetch bags, find a ride home or queue up for a rental car. And they all end up at the south end of the airport, creating a fair amount of congestion where baggage belts, rental counters and ride services converge.

The airport has no control over landing times, said Kayla Korvana, deputy director of communications, marketing and air service development for the Des Moines Airport Authority. But the airport is monitoring the ride situation, and recently the airport board OK'd allowing some older model vehicles to provide rides. Korvana said only around 8% of travelers had to wait more than 10 minutes for a taxi.

Yellow Cab is doing what it can, too. A dispatcher for the company said that as of July 31 it has halted street pickups between 10 p.m. and 1:30 am. That will allow it to focus on the airport.

A New Twist to the Housing Market Correction

BY LANCE LAMBERT FOR FORTUNE.COM

The Federal Reserve has a simple inflation-fighting playbook. It goes like this: Keep applying upward pressure on interest rates until business and consumer spending across the economy weakens and inflation recedes.

Historically speaking, the Fed's inflation-fighting playbook always delivers a particularly hard hit to the U.S. housing market. When it comes to housing transactions, monthly payments are everything. And when mortgage rates spike—which happens as soon as the Fed goes after inflation—those payments spike for new borrowers. That explains why as soon as mortgage rates rose this spring, the housing market slipped into a housing cool-down.

But that housing correction could soon lose some steam. Over the past week, mortgage rates have declined fast. As of Tuesday, the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate sits at 5.05%, down from June, when mortgage rates peaked at 6.28%. Those falling mortgage rates give sidelined homebuyers immediate relief. If a borrower in June took out a $500,000 mortgage at a 6.28% rate, they’d pay $3,088 monthly in principal and interest. At a 5.05% rate, that payment would be just $2,699. Over the course of the 30-year loan that’s a savings of $140,000.

What’s going on? As weakening economic data rolls in, financial markets are pricing in a 2023 recession. That’s putting downward pressure on mortgage rates. READ MORE.

Typical Person Who Changed Jobs Got 10% Pay Raise

BY GREG IACURCI FOR CNBC.COM

Many workers who changed jobs recently saw raises from their new paychecks outpace inflation by a wide margin—by nearly 10% or more, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center. The typical American who changed employers in the year from April 2021 to March 2022 got a 9.7% bump in their “real” wages over a year earlier, according to Pew, a nonpartisan research organization, which analyzed federal labor data.

“Real” wages measure the change in a worker’s pay after accounting for inflation, which in June was at its highest level in more than 40 years. The figure cited by Pew represents the median, meaning half of workers who switched jobs got a net pay increase of 9.7% or more. The other half of job switchers got a smaller net raise or saw their net earnings decline.

Workers have been leaving their jobs at elevated rates since early 2021 in a trend known as the Great Resignation. Demand for workers boomed as the U.S. economy reopened broadly from its pandemic-era hibernation, leading businesses to compete by raising pay. READ MORE.