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What Are Medicare Supplement Agents and Brokers?

A Medicare insurance agent is a licensed expert that helps you review and evaluate Medicare plans and their benefits and guides you in choosing a suitable one.

There are two kinds of Medicare insurance agents. The first is the independent Medicare insurance agent. This type of Medicare insurance agent works with many different insurance companies and can enroll you in health plans from any of them.

The second kind is the captive Medicare insurance agent. Unlike independent agents, captive agents partner with only one insurance company and are limited to plans from that particular insurer when assisting Medicare beneficiaries.

A Medicare insurance broker is quite similar to an independent Medicare insurance agent. They’re not bound to just one insurer. They can educate you about and enroll you in plans from different insurance companies.

How Can a Medicare Broker or Agent Help You?

Medicare insurance agents and brokers are truly knowledgeable about Medicare plans. Every year they must complete training and pass a test on their grasp of Medicare and its health and prescription drug plans.1 Here are the main ways Medicare insurance agents and brokers can help you:

Review Health Plans

Buying health coverage can be expensive. For this reason, you want to make sure that you end up with a plan (or combination of plans) that suits your needs the most. But Medicare plans, their benefits, rules, and exceptions can be quite overwhelming to navigate on one’s own.

A Medicare insurance agent or broker can help you streamline your options and eventually settle on one. They’ll speak with you and gain a solid understanding of your finances and health needs and then offer you plans that fit within those established parameters. Once you decide, the agent will enroll you in the plan.

Evaluate Your Current Coverage

Medicare insurance agents and brokers can help you review your current coverage to see if it still meets your needs. If it doesn’t, they can present you with options to choose from and help you change plans.

Save You Time and Effort

An advantage of using an experienced Medicare insurance agent or broker is that you can maximize efficiency in your search and still get excellent value. Without assistance from an agent or broker, if you want to have a variety of options to evaluate, you have to interface with different insurers—a process that can be time-consuming.

Do You Pay?

No, you don’t pay any fee for the assistance of a Medicare insurance agent or broker. Using their services is completely free.

So how then do they get paid?

Their compensation depends on the kind of agent or broker they are. The insurance companies directly employ some agents they represent. In contrast, others have merely had contracts based on enrolments they make.

Most agents get paid by commission. When they enroll someone in a plan, they receive a payment for the first year of the policy. And for every subsequent year the person remains on the plan, the enrolling agent or broker gets the initial amount.

The commission they receive for enrolling someone in a plan is not fixed. It’s determined by the contracts they have with the insurance company.