I confess. I do not read most of the information I receive from my health insurance companies. Now that I’m on Medicare I am dealing with 3 different plans: Medicare, United Health Care (for my Medicare supplement) and Aetna (for my Medicare Part D drug plan). (For a description of the different types of Medicare plans see the post on Medicare A, B, Cs).There are constant emails and occasional snail mail. Usually these are just explanation of benefits type notices. Rarely is there anything important and frankly health insurance notifications are just boring. But here is my story of why reading these notifications is so important.
Notification of Aetna SilverScript Premium Increase?
On Dec. 24 I received an invoice in the mail from Aetna for my 2025 SilverScript Part D plan. Now, an invoice I will definitely look at. I was shocked to see that the annual plan for 2025 cost $482.40. In 2024 my annual cost was $62.40 In other words an increase of over 700%. I was outraged.
I did a little googling and found that my current Aetna SilverScript plan had been discontinued and customers would be put into a different plan. Obviously, this plan costs A LOT more. I couldn’t find any notification of this change though as I noted above I don’t necessarily read everything I receive. But I’m pretty sure if I had received a notice that said your current plan is being discontinued and the new option will cost 7 times more than last year, I would have paid attention.
A quick check in with my friend Leah, who is way better at keeping on top of these things, let me know that there had been an email in September. She said it wasn’t easy to get to the part that explained the change but she’s persistent and found it. So she cancelled her Aetna plan for 2025 and switched to another plan with a much lower premium.
Did I receive the notification?
Hearing this made my curious. I went through my emails and documents but didn’t find anything. Then I checked my deleted trash folder and sure enough in September I received an email from Aetna which was titled “Important SilverScript Choice (PDP) Information – New Document Available.” It went on to say an Annual Notice of Change was now available and they provided a link to the document. Obviously, I ignored the email at the time. But usually plans have small increases and changes in coverage every year and I wasn’t concerned.
This time I followed the link. Here’s how I found the notification of the increase:
- I signed in to my account
- Assuming the document would be on the first page I came to I looked all around but didn’t see anything.
- Finally, I scrolled to the bottom and found a tab called Plan Benefits Document.
- Clicking on that brought me to a page with nothing of interest. I hit continue.
- This brought me to a screen with a lot of different options. One of them was called Annual Notice of Change.
- This led me to a 22 page document. After scrolling through 8 pages I saw the summary of the change in costs from 2024 to 2025. The following page was the first time I saw that my current plan no longer exists and if I didn’t do anything I would automatically be put in this new plan with the MUCH higher premium.
Bottom Line
Did Aetna provide the information about a new plan at a much higher cost? Yes they did. And I blame myself because I didn’t bother to read the notification from Aetna. But with such a big change in the plan if they really wanted people to take notice they would have made it clear in the email that my current plan was discontinued. That would have been enough to make me check further into the new plan. Also, they should have been up front about the price increase. But clearly they wanted to bury the lead and instead make it as difficult as possible to find the information. I guess they hoped that many people (like me) would not bother to dig too deep and would end up on the new plan. Then they would have to pay a much higher premium.
But hey Aetna, that only goes so far. There’s already a note on my calendar, on October 1 to be exact, to look at to my health plans for 2026 and check to see if there are any substantial chances. And I will definitely be looking for a new drug prescription plan. There’s no way I will sign up for Aetna again. So they got me this year but they’ve lost me for the long run.
Lesson learned.
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