L yndon Thomas Insurance
THIS MONTH INHISTORY August 1914
“Time flies when you’re having fun!” Or, so the saying goes. I’m getting to the stage of life where time just simply flies. Do I hear an “Amen, brother?” Another Medicare Annual Enrollment Period is just around the corner. Annual Enrollment Period, aka the Open Enrollment Period, is the time of year when anyone already in Medicare may add, change, or drop a Medicare Advantage Plan or Stand Alone Prescription Drug Plan. On or about October 1 If you are enrolled in a 2017 MAPD or SA-PDP, your Healthplan will mail you an Annual Notice of Change. The ANOC highlights any changes in your current plan for 2018. If you are satisfied with your plan and any changes are acceptable, you do not need to take any action for your plan to “roll over” and continue next year. You may also inform your plan that you wish to receive such plan materials via email. October 1–14 Medicare Advantage Plans and Stand Alone Prescription Drug Plans publish online their next year’s plan benefits, including any premium, copays, and plan changes. Agents may begin marketing activities and meeting with Medicare beneficiaries to discuss their 2018 plan benefit options. However, agents are prohibited from accepting AEP enrollments during Pre-AEP. October 15 through December 7 This is the Annual Enrollment Period, during which agents may continue marketing activities and receive enrollments. AEP enrollments become effective on January 1. It’s Time Again for Annual Enrollment Period! HERE’S THE TIMELINE: January 1 through February 14 This is known as the Medicare Advantage Disenrollment Period. this is the period of time when someone who has enrolled in a Medicare Advantage Plan during the previous AEP may disenroll from that MAPD and return to Original Medicare and, if desired, enroll in a Stand Alone Prescription Drug Plan. Keep in mind that all enrollment activities for those turning 65 and entering Medicare follow the Initial Enrollment Period guidelines. Medicare Supplement policy changes follow different guidelines. In a future issue, we will discuss Special Enrollment Periods.
August 1914 may be the most important August in history. Earlier that summer, Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been assassinated in Sarajevo (in an attempt that was almost botched but was ultimately successful). Tensions that had been simmering in Europe for years began to boil over, and in August the first shots were fired — the beginning of World War I. Patriotic and nationalistic jingoism amongst European nations soon turned to horror as the full picture of mechanized slaughter became clear to all. By the end of the year, a million European soldiers and citizens had been killed in the trenches and city streets. They were the first casualties of a war that would claim the lives of 16 million — and the souls of a rapidly globalizing world.
While young men were being cut down by the newest technology in the trenches, the folks back home in many European nations were being cut down by famine and disease. The war put
immense pressure on lines of supply — pressure that was intensified by intentional blockades of civilian food supplies by both sides of the conflict. Historian N.P. Howard writes that these blockades “spread death and disease, as famine encroached upon the civilian populations of Central Europe.” Blockades on some countries, especially Germany, were not lifted after the war ended in 1918. Punitive measures like these were designed to prevent Germany from rising again. Instead, they resulted in needless death and more tensions between Germany and the rest of the world, which ultimately led to the Second World War a few decades later. Some countries fared better. America and Canada, untouched at home across the Atlantic, found what Canadian Lieutenant Timothy C. Winegard describes as “a context of nationhood and a sense of pride in an achievement” as new-world nations testing their mettle. They had no food shortages, and the war boosted their economies. This was particularly true in America, which entered the war relatively late for the final effort to topple the German alliance. It was the United States’ first European intervention. But in August 1914, nobody knew any of that. Not the world leaders, not the men and women back home, and certainly not the millions of soldiers headed for the trenches. It was a lesson the world would never forget, even when war broke out again two decades later.
This flyer has not been approved by Medicare, and all information included here may be verified at www.Medicare.gov.
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