Medicare Supplement (Medigap) Plans on 30A

A Medicare Supplement pays some or all of your share of Medicare-covered bills, and most plans work with any doctor or hospital that accepts Medicare. In Florida, your health cannot be used to turn you down or raise your price during your six-month Medigap open enrollment period or a guaranteed-issue situation, such as your Medicare Advantage plan leaving your county.

Medicare Supplement dates and numbers for 2027

• Medigap open enrollment period: six months, starting the first month you are 65 or older and enrolled in Medicare Part B.

• Guaranteed issue if your Medicare Advantage plan ends or leaves your county and you return to Original Medicare: from the day you receive the plan’s letter (most are dated October 2, 2026) until 63 days after its coverage ends, about March 4, 2027 for a plan ending December 31, 2026.

• Earliest start for a supplement bought under that right: the day after the old plan’s coverage ends, which is January 1, 2027 for a December 31 ending.

• Medicare’s Annual Enrollment Period for 2027 plans: October 15 to December 7, 2026, for Medicare Advantage and drug plans only. It does not reopen your Medigap rights.

• Florida birthday rule or yearly switching window for supplements: none.

• High-deductible Plan G deductible for 2027: three thousand fifty dollars. High-deductible Plan F uses the same amount.

• Medicare’s 2027 cap on out-of-pocket costs for covered Part D drugs: two thousand four hundred dollars.

• Medicare’s 2027 limit on a Part D plan’s deductible: seven hundred dollars.

• Part A and Part B amounts for 2027: set by Medicare each fall. Until they are published, the figures further down this page are the 2026 amounts.

We do not offer every plan available in your area. Currently we represent 3 organizations which offer 8 products in your area. Please contact Medicare.gov or 1-800-MEDICARE to get information on all of your options.

When can you buy a Medicare Supplement in Florida regardless of your health?

In two kinds of windows. Outside them, a Florida Medicare Supplement company can ask health questions and turn you down, so the first thing we work out with anyone is which window they are in.

Your six-month Medigap open enrollment period

Your Medigap open enrollment period is the six months that start the first month you are both 65 or older and enrolled in Part B. Inside that window, a company must sell you any Medicare Supplement plan it offers in Florida that you are eligible to buy, and your health cannot be used to turn you down or raise your price. If you have less than six months of continuous health coverage when you apply, with no gap longer than 63 days, the company can make you wait up to six months, minus the months of coverage you had, before it pays toward a condition that was treated or diagnosed in the six months before the policy starts. If you are still working at 65 and put off Part B because you have coverage through a current employer, the window waits for you and starts when your Part B does.

If you are on Medicare before 65 because of a disability or end-stage renal disease, Florida law requires companies that sell Medicare Supplement policies here to offer you coverage too, with a six-month window that starts when you enroll in Part B and a second one when you turn 65.

If your Medicare Advantage plan is ending or leaving your county

Several Medicare Advantage plans sold in Walton, Okaloosa and Bay counties in 2026 are not offered here for 2027, and most plans that are not renewing mail their members a letter dated October 2. If your letter says your plan is ending or leaving your county and you go back to Original Medicare, federal and Florida law give you a guaranteed right to buy certain Medicare Supplement plans: no health questions, no higher price because of your health, and no wait for a pre-existing condition. The window opens when you receive the letter and closes 63 days after your coverage ends, which is about March 4, 2027 for a plan ending December 31. The new supplement can start no earlier than the day after the old plan ends.

Which plans are guaranteed depends on when you first became eligible for Medicare.

• First eligible on or after January 1, 2020: Plans A, B, D, G, high-deductible G, K and L.

• First eligible before January 1, 2020: Plans A, B, C, F, high-deductible F, K and L.

Plan N appears on neither list. If you were eligible before 2020, the law guarantees Plan F in this situation, not Plan G, and whether a company will also accept you for Plan G without health questions is its own decision, so ask us to check with the companies we represent before you apply.

Read the letter closely. A plan that is leaving your county triggers the right even when the same company offers you a different plan here. If the letter says you will be moved automatically into another plan from the same company for 2027, that is usually a renewal, and the right usually does not apply. Bring the letter to the office or read it to us over the phone. Our guide to what to do when your Medicare Advantage plan is ending walks through the dates, the drug plan and the order of steps.

Other times the door reopens

Federal law creates a few other guaranteed-issue situations: employer or union coverage that pays after Medicare is ending; you joined a Medicare Advantage plan when you first became eligible at 65, or dropped a supplement to try one for the first time, and you leave within the first year, which is called the trial right; or a supplement company goes bankrupt or misleads you. Each has its own plan list and generally runs on a 63-day clock, so call us before you cancel anything.

Florida law adds one more: if you are enrolled in Part B and your coverage under a group health insurance policy ends, a company that sells Medicare Supplement policies here must offer you coverage for two months afterward without using your health to turn you down or raise your price.

Outside those windows

You can apply for a Medicare Supplement any time of year, but outside these windows the company can ask health questions and decline you. Florida has no birthday rule and no yearly window to switch supplements without health questions. Medicare’s fall Annual Enrollment Period, October 15 to December 7, covers Medicare Advantage and drug plans and does not reopen your Medigap rights. That is why this decision deserves an hour with somebody licensed.

What Original Medicare leaves you holding in 2026

In plain terms, a supplement pays your share of the hospital and doctor bills that Original Medicare covers but does not pay in full. Part A charges you a deductible every time a new benefit period starts, then daily coinsurance if the stay runs long. Part B pays about eighty percent of approved charges and leaves you the other twenty percent, with no annual limit on what that twenty percent can become. A supplement puts a ceiling on both. What it does not do is pay for care Original Medicare will not cover, which is where most of the surprises come from.

On the hospital side, Part A charges a deductible of one thousand seven hundred thirty-six dollars per benefit period. Read that as per benefit period, not per year. A benefit period ends after you have been out of a hospital or skilled nursing facility for sixty days in a row, so two separate admissions far enough apart mean two deductibles in the same calendar year.

If the stay runs past sixty days, you owe four hundred thirty-four dollars a day for days sixty-one through ninety. Past that you owe eight hundred sixty-eight dollars a day for days ninety-one through one hundred fifty, drawn from a lifetime reserve of sixty days. You get sixty of those days for your entire life and they do not renew.

Skilled nursing runs two hundred seventeen dollars a day for days twenty-one through one hundred.

On the doctor side, Part B has an annual deductible of two hundred eighty-three dollars, and then you owe generally twenty percent of the Medicare-approved amount for the rest of the year. That twenty percent has no annual maximum. In a routine year it hardly registers. In the year of a cardiac event, a joint replacement, or a cancer diagnosis, it is the number that matters.

The day one hundred fifty-one cliff

Once your lifetime reserve days are gone, Original Medicare stops paying for that hospital stay entirely and you owe one hundred percent.

Every standardized Medicare Supplement plan adds three hundred sixty-five additional hospital days over your lifetime after Medicare’s days run out. During those days the insurance company pays what Medicare would have paid, and the hospital cannot come after you for the difference. Most people never need it. For the few who do, it covers a bill that would otherwise be entirely theirs.

What Plan G covers, and why Plan F is off the table for most people

Plan G picks up the Part A deductible, the Part A coinsurance, the additional three hundred sixty-five hospital days, skilled nursing coinsurance, blood, hospice coinsurance, your Part B twenty percent, and Part B excess charges.

It does not cover the annual Part B deductible. That deductible, two hundred eighty-three dollars in 2026, is the one bill you keep, and it is the entire difference between Plan G and the old Plan F.

Plan F covered that deductible too, but it closed to anyone who became eligible for Medicare on or after January 1, 2020. If your Medicare eligibility started in 2020 or later, Plan F is not available to you at any price, and no plan you can buy covers the Part B deductible.

The rest of this page uses Plan G as the reference point, because it is what most people are comparing. The standardized plans are not identical, though. Plans K and L cover only a portion of your Part B twenty percent, fifty percent and seventy-five percent respectively, in exchange for a lower premium and an annual cap on what you spend out of pocket. Plan N pays the coinsurance except for small copays on some office visits and emergency room visits, and it does not cover Part B excess charges. Where this page says a supplement pays your twenty percent, that is true of Plan G and most of the other plans, and only partly true of K and L.

There is also a high-deductible version of Plan G. It pays the same benefits as Plan G once you meet a yearly deductible, three thousand fifty dollars for 2027, and in exchange its premium is generally lower. It fits people who would rather carry a known amount of risk than a higher monthly bill. The same deductible applies to high-deductible Plan F, which only people eligible for Medicare before 2020 can buy.

The rule almost nobody explains, and it costs people real money

A Medicare Supplement pays only on services Original Medicare approves. If Medicare does not cover something at all, your supplement does not cover it either. Not part of it. Not at a discount. Nothing.

There is one place a supplement pays for a kind of care Original Medicare does not cover at all, and that is foreign travel emergency care. Plans C, D, F, G, M, and N include it. That benefit pays eighty percent of billed charges for medically necessary emergency care, after a two hundred fifty dollar annual deductible, with a fifty thousand dollar lifetime maximum, and only for care beginning in the first sixty days of a trip outside the country.

Everything else runs through Medicare first. That matters more than it does in most markets, because a lot of our clients use care Medicare was never built to pay for.

About that foreign travel benefit, and why we tell clients not to lean on it

We just told you it is the one thing your supplement covers that Medicare does not. Now here is the part the brochure does not put in bold.

Read the limits again. Eighty percent, so you still owe twenty percent of whatever a hospital abroad charges. Fifty thousand dollars is a lifetime maximum, not an annual one. The two hundred fifty dollar deductible resets every year, but the ceiling never resets at all. Use it once at sixty-seven for a bad fall in Italy and it is substantially gone for the rest of your life. And it only pays for care that begins in the first sixty days of a trip, which quietly fails anyone doing a long stay abroad or an extended cruise.

It was also never designed to get you home. Emergency medical treatment overseas is one bill. Getting you stabilized, transported, and repatriated to a hospital in the United States is a different and usually much larger one, and it is not what this benefit is built to do.

So we treat the foreign travel benefit as a small backstop rather than a plan. Before a real trip abroad, we point clients toward a standalone travel medical policy written for the actual exposure, with meaningful limits and evacuation and repatriation coverage included. It is inexpensive relative to the trip and to what it protects against.

One more thing worth knowing before you book. Original Medicare generally pays for medically necessary care aboard a cruise ship only when the ship is in United States territorial waters, which means within six hours of a United States port. Once you are farther out than that, Medicare does not pay, and neither does your supplement outside of the foreign travel benefit and its limits. If you sail out of Jacksonville, New Orleans, or Tampa, that is worth a phone call before you go.

Concierge doctors, and doctors who have left Medicare

There are three situations here and they are not the same.

If your doctor participates in Medicare and charges a separate membership fee for extras like same-day access or a longer annual visit, Medicare and your supplement still pay their normal share of the covered medical care. The membership fee itself is not covered by Medicare, and standardized Medicare Supplement plans do not pay it either.

If your doctor does not participate but still accepts Medicare, they can bill you above the Medicare-approved amount. That is an excess charge and it has its own section below.

If your doctor has formally opted out of Medicare, you are in a different world. Opted-out physicians see Medicare patients under a private written contract. Medicare pays nothing. You are not permitted to submit the claim yourself. And because your supplement only pays a share of what Medicare approves, your supplement pays nothing either. You owe the entire bill, with no limiting charge protecting you.

That is the most expensive surprise in this whole subject and it is completely avoidable. Medicare publishes a list of physicians who have opted out, updated monthly, and those elections renew automatically every two years. Ask the question before your first appointment, not after the bill arrives.

Acupuncture

Medicare covers acupuncture for exactly one condition: chronic low back pain. The pain has to have lasted twelve weeks or longer, have no identifiable systemic cause, and not be tied to surgery or pregnancy. You get up to twelve visits in ninety days, eight more if you are improving, and no more than twenty in a year. Treatment stops if you are not getting better.

Acupuncture for migraine, neuropathy, arthritis, fibromyalgia, nausea, or anything else is not covered by Original Medicare, and your supplement pays nothing toward it.

There is a second catch that surprises people here: Medicare does not recognize licensed acupuncturists as billing providers. Covered treatment has to be furnished by a physician, physician assistant, nurse practitioner, or clinical nurse specialist, or by someone working under that provider’s direct supervision and billed under their number. Many acupuncturists practice independently, which means even covered low back treatment often cannot be billed to Medicare at all.

Chiropractic

Part B covers one chiropractic service: manual manipulation of the spine to correct a subluxation. That is the whole benefit.

Not covered when a chiropractor performs or orders it: X-rays, the office visit or exam itself, massage, acupuncture, ultrasound, electrical stimulation, traction, therapeutic exercise, nutritional supplements, and orthotics. Manipulation of anything outside the spine is also not covered.

Maintenance care is not covered either. Once treatment is holding you steady rather than actively correcting something, Medicare stops paying for it. Your chiropractor should hand you an Advance Beneficiary Notice before performing anything in that category so you know in advance that the bill is yours.

Your supplement pays its share of the twenty percent on the covered adjustment. On everything else in that list it pays nothing.

Functional and integrative medicine

Medicare covers a functional medicine visit only when a Medicare-enrolled physician bills a medically necessary service tied to a covered diagnosis. The approach itself is not a benefit category.

The testing is where the bills land. Comprehensive stool analysis, food sensitivity panels, organic acids testing, heavy metal provocation, saliva and dried urine hormone panels, micronutrient testing, and expanded thyroid panels are generally treated as investigational or not medically necessary and are denied. Nutritional supplements, IV vitamin therapy, and chelation outside of diagnosed heavy metal poisoning are not covered.

When the claim is denied, your supplement pays nothing, because Medicare’s approved amount was zero and a share of zero is zero.

Compounded prescriptions and bioidentical hormones

A supplement does not include prescription drug coverage, so a compounded prescription filled at a pharmacy runs through Part D, and Part D has a rule that catches a lot of people.

For Part D to pay, every ingredient in a compounded prescription has to itself qualify as a Part D drug. Bulk chemical powder, which is what most compounding pharmacies start from, does not qualify. That means compounded bioidentical hormone pellets are generally not covered, and neither are most custom compounds built from bulk ingredients.

Where you get a medication changes who pays for it

This is one of the most useful things to understand about Medicare and almost nobody explains it.

Medications you pick up at a pharmacy are generally Part D. Medications a doctor gives you in the office, in an infusion suite, or in a hospital outpatient setting are generally Part B. If you are formally admitted as an inpatient, your medications are usually bundled into what Part A pays for the stay. Same person, same year, three different sets of rules.

Part B drugs include infusions and injections you cannot administer yourself, chemotherapy given in the office, the eye injections used for macular degeneration, drugs delivered through durable medical equipment such as a nebulizer or an insulin pump, certain oral cancer and anti-nausea drugs, immunosuppressants after a Medicare-covered transplant, and injectable osteoporosis drugs for homebound patients who meet the requirements.

Here is why it matters. Part B drugs carry the same twenty percent coinsurance as everything else under Part B, with no annual cap. A biologic infusion or a course of chemotherapy can run into the thousands per treatment, and twenty percent of that is yours every single time.

A Medicare Supplement pays your share of it. How much depends on the plan: Plan G pays your twenty percent, Plans K and L pay a portion of it, and Plan N pays it apart from its copays. So while a supplement includes no pharmacy drug coverage at all, it does cover your share of drugs administered in a clinical setting, and for someone with a serious diagnosis that can be among the largest things the policy ever pays.

Your Part D plan handles the pharmacy side and works differently. For 2027, Medicare limits a drug plan’s deductible to seven hundred dollars and caps your yearly out-of-pocket cost for covered drugs at two thousand four hundred dollars. Once you reach the cap, you pay no copayments or coinsurance for covered drugs for the rest of the year, though your plan’s premium continues. Some standalone drug plan premiums may change more than usual for 2027 because a federal demonstration that has been holding some of them down ends after 2026, so we compare the total yearly cost, premium plus your drugs, before you choose one.

Excess charges, and why they matter more in Florida

A doctor who accepts Medicare but has not signed a participation agreement can bill you up to fifteen percent above the Medicare-approved amount for that service. That is an excess charge and you owe it.

Eight states ban or limit these charges. Florida is not one of them. That makes excess charge coverage worth more here than it would be in Connecticut or New York, and it is one of the real practical differences between Plan G, which covers excess charges, and Plan N, which does not.

Snowbirds, sunbirds, and the six-month rule

Two different people, same problem.

Snowbirds come down to 30A for the winter and head home in the spring. Sunbirds are our actual neighbors, people who live in Santa Rosa Beach or Watersound or Inlet Beach year-round on paper and leave for the northern states or the mountains from June through September.

Most Medicare Supplement plans do not care where you are. There is no network and no service area. Any provider in the country that accepts Medicare works with your plan and you do not need a referral to see a specialist. The one exception is a variant called Medicare SELECT, which does require you to use network hospitals for non-emergency care, so if you have one of those, check how it handles care away from home.

Medicare Advantage is built differently. Every plan has a service area, most use a provider network, and the rules for care away from home vary by plan. There is also a rule most people never hear until it affects them. An Advantage plan is required to disenroll a member who has been outside the plan’s service area for more than six months, unless the plan offers a visitor or traveler option that extends that window. A sunbird gone June through September is fine. One who leaves in May and drifts back at Christmas is not.

The geography here reinforces the point. Walton County has two hospitals, Ascension Sacred Heart Emerald Coast in Miramar Beach and North Walton Doctors Hospital in DeFuniak Springs, with more options west into Okaloosa County and east into Bay County. Even so, a lot of specialized and complex care still happens somewhere else entirely: Pensacola, Birmingham, Jacksonville, Nashville, Atlanta, Houston. We work with clients from Grayton Beach and Seaside to Destin, Freeport, and Panama City Beach, and the farther you are from a major medical center the more a plan with no network is worth. It has no opinion about where you go.

How Florida law affects your premium

Florida does not permit a Medicare Supplement premium to be increased because of your attained age. Section 627.410 of the Florida Statutes bars attained-age premium structures on policy forms sold mostly to people 65 and older. Florida is one of a small number of states that regulates supplement rating this way, so a supplement sold in Florida cannot raise your rate simply because you have gotten a year older.

Premiums can still change. Carriers can adjust rates for an entire class of policyholders based on medical cost trend, and when that happens it applies to everyone in the class at the same time. What Florida law prevents is an increase triggered by your birthday alone.

What a supplement does not do

No pharmacy prescription drug coverage. You pair a supplement with a standalone Part D plan.

No routine dental, vision, or hearing. Dental can be added as its own policy, and our individual dental page covers the plans we place.

No meaningful international coverage, for the reasons above.

Medicare Advantage is another way to get your Part A and Part B coverage, through a private plan with its own service area and rules, which vary by plan. It is a genuinely different structure with different tradeoffs, and for some people it is the better answer. What it comes down to is which doctors you want to keep, how many months a year you are actually here, and how you would rather absorb the cost of a bad year. Our overview of how Original Medicare, Medicare Advantage and a supplement compare lays the choices side by side.

Talk to someone licensed and local

Chris Jayne, Trista Cordell and Garrett Fuller handle Medicare Supplement, Prescription Drug Plan, and Medicare Advantage questions. All three work out of our office at 4821 US Highway 98 W, Suite 103, Santa Rosa Beach, FL 32459, open 9 to 4, Monday through Thursday.

Call the office at 850-622-5283 and ask for Chris Jayne, Trista Cordell, or Garrett Fuller, Fuller Insurance LLC, Florida license L039483. Have your Part A and Part B start dates, your doctors, your prescriptions, and any letter from your current plan handy, and we will go over which window you are in and the plans the companies we represent offer in your county.

When you share your information with us, a licensed Fuller Insurance agent will contact you.

Dollar figures that change each year carry their year on this page, and the 2026 Part A and Part B amounts change for 2027 when Medicare announces them. Benefits for each lettered plan are standardized by law, premiums vary by company, and your own policy controls. Outside a guaranteed-issue situation or your open enrollment period, coverage is subject to underwriting.

Fuller Insurance is not connected with or endorsed by the U.S. government or the federal Medicare program.