Depends on what you mean by "Major Medical" Some companies call a policy with a huge deductible,(several thousand) Major medical because it picks up and pays a certain percent after you have paid that deductable. Others will have a lot of restrictions. Some will pay only if you are in a hospital. At your age, you could get a regular policy with any on the main line companies like AARP, Blue Cross, New York Life. I think that would be your best bet and forget about any other type of policy. Decide what you need and don't need. Dental coverage is nice if you have terrible teeth, but isn't worth the cost if your teeth are in good shape. The same thing is true of things like organ transplants, and ambulance fees. Nice if you need them, but most likely you would not. Therefore, not worth the additional premium. When you reach 65, Medicare will pay 80% of the APPROVED amount and your insurance will pick up only the remaining 20%.

chisue, understand the lesser of two evils. They use prednisone for my disease too. Thankfully, I've never been bad enough to have to use it on a daily basis. I'm allergic to one of the main drugs to treat my disease so if my current drugs really stops working I will have no choice but to take those awful , dangerous and expensive drugs. Hopefully it will never come to that. I have one older brother that did not move to the States when my family moved and so I've really been thinking about how much easier it was for him to retire in Canada. No jumping through all these hoops to figure out how to get his health care needs covered. Emma, what I understand is that they don't have to insure you if you have had a gap in insurance and are outside the 6 month open enrollment. Our situation was a little confusing to these insurers because our medicare part A automatically kicked in at 65 and our B took effect two years later when my husband turned 67. So they carelessly were just looking at the date part A kicked in and assumed we'd had a two year gap in coverage. Some asked if we'd been on cobra. They were asking for proof of insurance until I reminded them that medicare B was just starting and we were within the 6 month open enrollment. The drug plan still said that if I had not been covered they would have raised my premium.Not sure if that is legal under the 6 month open enrollment, but I didn't research it anymore sine it didn't apply to me. In my case, if I went without and then ended up going on one of those $3000 a month drugs and then decided at that time to get part D, no one would be too excited to insure me . And you can bet if one of my drugs was $3000 a month and they agreed to insure me, my premium would be pretty hefty. Our total costs for the two of us are around $480 a month United(AARP) is $116.78 for me, $121.94 for my husband. It is community based which means they can't raise your premium just because you are a year older. It goes up according to your zip code. In my state there were only two options for community based or issue age --the two that can't be raised because you are a year older. All the others were attained age which will go up for each year older you get. Then medicare B is $99.90 for each of us. I'm paying $27 for my part D and my husband picked the cheapest for 15 a month. I didn't figure it was as important to get the perfect plan with drug because it apparently is easy to change at the end of the year if what you picked didn't work out so well. It just seemed to me that there was a real learning curve to getting this all arranged. Dedtired, I'm confused why you would be paying 300 a month for medicare part B or something else?? something doesn't sound right.

In Rita May's defense, sometimes the choices we have to make are difficult. It's easy to say that it isn't a good idea to not have health insurance. But the cost can be prohibitive. I don't know if prices are uniform all over the country or not, but I can tell you that here in California private insurance costs are outrageous. And fewer and fewer employers are offering health insurance to employees, or are making them pay a large portion of it. And because DH has had cancer, changing insurances isn't a real option for us (remember pre-existing conditions). Every year when our contract renews, of course the price goes up. Last year we were paying more than $1,100 per month for the two of us to have medical and dental. In June, when our contract came up for renewal, it was going up another $200+. So we ended up moving to a plan with less coverage to bring the cost down. And this is with a high deductible. So every month I pay for the privilege of SAYING that we have health coverage, but we pay full price until our large deductible is met (we're healthy, so deductible is never met). We argue about this subject every month when I write the check. He says we're throwing our money away. I argue that, while I agree that it's not helping us out now, chances are that as we get older we may need to be hospitalized for one thing or another and that is when the insurance will become "worth it". Many people have to choose between having health insurance and having food on the table. It isn't any wonder that there are so many uninsured. Sad, sad, sad.

Looks as though you have gotten some good advice so far but thought I would add my 2 cents. I am currently employed as a Medical Transcriptionist and thankful I only have about a year to go before I can retire. I have been a transcriptionist for approximately 33 years and have seen the profession slowly disintegrate. Our hospital started out with 10 full time employees, now we are 3 FT with 2 PT. Last week, we didn't have enough work for everyone so us 3 FT employees took a day off so the 2 part time could get their hours in (we get PTO, they don't). Our hospital installed the voice recognition system about 2 to 3 years ago and it has been downhill for us since then. As people quit, they were not replaced. There are a few doctors that will refuse to use the system and a few that the system can not pick up well enough to transcribe but that's not enough to keep everyone busy. We are now known as editors since we basically listen and follow along with the report, correct errors, etc, and not transcriptionist since we don't transcribe very much now. There are coder jobs that can be done at home as we have coders doing this and so far their positions are safe, I think we have about 10 of those still. This would be a safer position if you think this is something you would like. Hope I have helped in your decision. Lizzann