By Chris Fry, November 12, 2025
As a senior who has been and is an advocate for Medicare for All, with good healthcare as a right deserved by all people, I urge fellow seniors to study carefully their options during this Medicare enrollment period.
I think my experience this year might be useful.
I was diagnosed in the Spring with cancer. I am covered by an HMO Medicare Advantage plan. Unlike the Medicare Supplemental (Medigap), it does cover prescription drugs, and modestly covers dental and vision.
But when my local physician sought authorization from my insurance plan to get a second opinion from the renowned Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in NYC, my insurance plan refused.. After a couple of months, they relented, but only for one meeting.
After examining test results of my condition, the doctor at Sloan urged immediate treatment. Concerned that my insurance plan would not cover those procedures at Sloan, I asked for a cost estimate fort the preliminary diagnostic testing procedures “out of pocket”. That came in over $50K.
The likely complex surgery afterwards is projected to cost in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps over a million.
Fortunately for me, my insurance plan has decided to cover my initial diagnostic procedures as “out of network”.
The political elite of both parties and their corporate patrons want those of us unable now to generate wealth for them to drop dead. The Trumpist program has stepped up that effort in health care, including for seniors.
Of course, plotting the best Medicare program is up to you. I just recommend examining them very carefully. Many insurance companies, for example, are eliminating their more robust PPO Medicare Advantage programs to the skimpier Medicare HMO Advantage program.
And some have eliminated their more robust Medicare Supplemental plans that offer better coverage for expensive procedures.
All I suggest during this sign-up period is that you examine your choices very carefully, realizing that in 2026 you may encounter a serious condition that these Medicare programs, with Medicare itself a hard-won gain from struggle by our class, now may not provide the help that we need.
As the poet Dylan Thomas said:
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
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