My husband will turn 65 in December. He just signed up for Secure Horizons, which sounds like it will cover just about everything Medicare doesn't, almost too good to be true, but worth a try to check into for you. Good luck.

DH and I are going with AdvantraRX for 2009 after being with Humana this year. Google Medicare Part D ("I'm feeling lucky" to go directly to Medicare site). You can put in all your meds and your zip code, etc., and Medicare will show you all the plans in your area and the costs for each so you can easily compare and decide which plan to go for. We also have a Medicare Advantage plan (not a supplement) for $70 a month, each, for 2009 and no co-pays, no deductibles, 25% co-pay only for radiation therapy with a $1000 stop-loss. It's the best plan we have ever had. You can also check, on the Medicare website, for the best plans for Medicare Advantage which are ususally cheaper than supplement plans. Big variations, however. The first plan my DH had was cheap, but had co-pays with no stop-loss. Didn't think that would be a problem, but he had open heart surgery and contracted MRSA as a result and the co-pays ended up being about $4,000. We are almost finished paying them off, 2-1/2 years later. Learned a very expensive lesson. Make sure there is a stop-loss if you have any co-pays.

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.

@sushipup2 you are probably right. I can't remember exactly what dad had; sadly he passed away a few years ago. I believe he did have vision coverage. We have vision care through my former employer but not dental insurance. What was offered through work did not cover our (wonderful) dentists, and I would rather pay than change. So, I guess we'll be used to that if need be, when we go on Medicare.