In our post-truth world, ignorance about Medicare has reached avalanche proportions.  The greatest and most secure health care system in the world is now suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in the form of babbling malcontents whose ignorance of Medicare is only matched by their outrage at it.  Just go to Facebook or some other social media cesspool and you will see a lot of such heat, but precious little light.  Medicare complainers, please heal yourselves and do a little, or preferably a lot, of research. Please!

Today, Sunday, November 10, 2023, I reflect on the events of Veterans Day Weekend 1963, when JFK and Oswald lived out their last Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, November 10-12, 1963. We review what we know of those fateful days. Next, I talk about the events of Wednesday, November 13 through Friday, November 22, 1963, to be published here on Audibly Speaking before Friday, November 22, 2024.

In this final episode about my opinions and experience with learning Medicare for retirement, I spread the word that many people are talking about:  Medicare Advantage plans and Part D Prescription Drug plans are undergoing big changes, premium hikes and in some cases disappearing acts during this Annual Election Period between October 15 and December 7. If you are on Medicare Advantage OR a Part D prescription drug plan (you can’t be on both) you need to research Medicare.gov to see if you have a plan that will continue to have the same benefits and premiums as in 2024. In most cases, benefits are going down, premiums are going up and some plans are actually shutting down.  Watch the Youtube videos by Mathew Claassen on Medicare for expert and accurate advice to follow. This episode is only my opinion and personal experience. It may not be yours.

In this third part of my series on what I have learned, or thought I have learned, about Medicare I talk about some myths I have discovered about Medicare Advantage and Part B.  While Medicare Advantage may be the right choice for some people, I cringe when I watch the commercials during this Annual Election Period and see the slick pitch that insurance companies make to see the cash cow (for them) of MA.  Here are the realities that I see from behind just some of the myths about both Medicare Advantage and Medicare Part B.

What in the world is Part D?  My personal experience learning what I appreciated to find out about Medicare Part D coverage is the subject of this this brief podcast episode. Disclaimer: These are my opinions and what my impressions were. This is no substitute or necessarily as accurate as your doing your own research on Medicare.  It is just an opinion piece on my reflections of my own experience.

Medicare is confusing– what an understatement. Two years out from retirement I decided to try to understand it, suspecting that it might take me that long.  I was not wrong!  Now that I am retired and am now on Medicare, I tell this slightly autobiographical tale of what I think I have learned about Medicare in hope that it will either be interesting to or helpful for others, whichever the case may be.

Listen to this audio version of my Youtube video explaining the “Single Bullet Theory” of the JFK assassination, and WHY IT IS TRUE.  Many conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination discredit themselves by disputing this thrice-confirmed theory first revealed by the Warren Commission in 1964.

In many ways, I regard this as my best recording of a chapter from “The American Yawp” yet.  I have deleted nothing from the text edited by its editors, Joseph Locke and Ben Wright.  I have added passages of my own where I think additions were needed to clarify what the original authors were trying to say. I have also added passages that connect the era of “The New Nation” with the trials and tensions America is experiencing today.  For example I connect the majesty of America’s example in displaying the peaceful transition of power in the “revolution of 1800” which saw the Democratic-Republican Party receive power in 1800 from the Federalist Party without violence, and the more than 200 years of like examples to follow, with the disgrace of January 6, 2021, when President Donald Trump despoiled this legacy and broke that legacy so important not only to the United States but the whole world.  These allusions between past and present are mine, and they are also true.

Late in his authorial career, in the 1920s to be precise, Arthur Conan Doyle, who was then deeply immersed in beliefs of mysticism and seances, had occasion to pair his rational detective, Sherlock Holmes, with a case about vampires. Did Doyle change the hyper-rational Holmes to suit the author’s new beliefs? Listen and find out!

In the course that covers the first half of American History, the chapter on the Sectional Crisis of the Union, also sometimes called “The Impending Crisis,” leading to the American Civil War, is the penultimate such chapter.  Next to the magisterial, Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the crisis written by the great historian David Potter, that one audio narrated by Eric Martin, this chapter from the Open Educational Source textbook, “The American Yawp,” narrated by me, Dr. Rick Reiman, surveys the crisis well in capturing succinctly its fateful highlights. Listen, learn and enjoy. An historian myself I have added a few sentences of my own to improve, I firmly believe, on the chapter’s effort to make the Sectional Crisis more understandable.

No ordeal in American history changed America so much or so enduringly as the American Civil War.  Listen as well as read of the odyssey and what it was all about, or just listen with this audio offering.