Medicare Part B – A Detailed Overview
The second part of Medicare or Medicare Part B covers all the medically essential services and supplies often needed for diagnosis and treatment of common ailments. This comprises all outpatient services, ambulance, preventive services and durable medical equipment such as wheelchairs and walkers. Alongside all that, Medical Insurance, as it’s called pay for all part-time or intermittent home health and rehabilitative services including physical therapy.
The two types of services covered by Part B
All Medically Necessary – it comprises all those services and supplies needed to diagnose and treat a medical condition aptly. Fundamentally, Part B is all about physical examinations, tests, labs and screening, blood tests, urine analysis, bone mass measurement, diabetes screening, and colorectal cancer screening. All of these and more are applicable where they are done in the hospital or outside the medical facility.
Preventive Shots – aside from diagnosis and treatment services, Medicare Part B takes into account all those health care services that detect illnesses at their infancy and work towards taming them. It thus means that anyone under this federal health insurance program’s Part B can get shots against common diseases like Flu, Pneumonia, TB and Hepatitis B. Prevention of diseases under this plan extends to using all the conventional therapies and all that come under Part B of Medicare.
Medicare Part B Costs
Much like Medicare Part A, costs in Medical Insurance are paid in the form of either monthly premium or yearly deductible fees, though premiums may change from year to year. The amounts do vary depending on the specific situations against the insured too, although you may have to pay more if your income is higher than someone earning less. Moreover, some penalties accompany late enrollments, though they’re inevitably paid by those who aren’t eligible for the Special Enrollment Periods.
Special Enrollment Periods only apply to persons with existing employer health coverage. But it’s important to know that some states have special waiver fees for payments of premiums or deductibles and it’s your responsibility to check if you qualify for any of them. And, to be safer and maybe avoid incurring any penalties, it’s important that you get your enrollment dates right.
Enrolment
Enrollment for Medicare Part B is more (or less) similar to that of Medicare Part A, and you must be eligible. It is important that you talk with your doctor concerning Medicare before deciding on it because some services might not apply to you.