Beware of Rogue Web Sites about Medicare
January 23, 2012 in Health Insurance, Medicare
I suppose I could have ended the above sentence after “web sites,” but because I do a lot of research on Medicare, I tend to see many web sites apparently designed to fool senior citizens. Beware!
The web site medicare.gov is the official web site of the U.S.’s Centers for Medicare/Medicaid Services (CMS) specifically for Medicare information. To make life simple I would suggest that you look at no other web site for information unless it is the site of an organization to which you belong such as AARP, a union, etc. (and remember even AARP is trying to sell you insurance)
The worst example of a rogue web site trying to fool seniors is the new site medicaregov.us. Note that the URL for the rogue site has no period between medicare and ‘gov,’ as in the official CMS site. But the home page of the rogue site makes the claim that it is “about medicare.gov.” There does not appear to be any relation to CMS.
Specific to Massachusetts seniors or residents otherwise eligible for Medicare, beware of sites that claim to be offering low cost Medicare Supplement insurance. I don’t know how good or bad this site is in terms of helping seniors outside Massachusetts, but it does not include accurate information about Massachusetts. In Massachusetts, there are only two types of supplemental policies (also called Medigap) sold to inviduals. All you need to know is on one screen that you can get to very easily from the medicare.gov site.
I am just scratching the surface in mentioning these two possibilities. The number of rogue sites is as long as the list of scams that criminals have tried to pull on seniors since before there was an Internet.
