This video is going to be about where to sign up for Medicare after you retire. So let’s say you’re past the age of 65, you have your Medicare Part A and you’re still working. Now you’re maybe 70 years old and you say to yourself, “I want to retire. I want to get on Part B and start Medicare as my health insurance. I’ve been getting health insurance from my employer or my spouse has been getting health insurance from his or her employer.”
So the first step that you’re going to want to do is go to cms.gov. Now, you’re going to want to do this at least four months prior to when you’re going to retire. The reason is you can go on Medicare Part B any month of the year if you’ve had health insurance from the time you were 65 years old when you were eligible for Medicare up until now when you’re about to retire. If there was a break in your coverage, you’re going to have to sign up in January, between January 1st and March 31st and your coverage is going to start July 1st.
But let’s just say you’ve worked for the same person for the past 30 years, you wanted to work until you’re 70 or 68, whatever it is so you did not get on Part B. In this video, I’m going to show you how to get on Part B and start your Medicare. The first thing you want to do is go to cms.gov as you see up here in the URL. Now when you get here, you’re going to have to print out two forms. The first form… And I actually did a video on this, I think it was a couple years ago so I want to put it on the screen here because the video’s great, but I didn’t put it on this channel and it’s fuzzy. So the forms are here, the CMS form 40B and CMS form L564.
So the first form that we’re going to do is the 40B, and it’s a little bit different, but I’ll go over this. So you type in 40B in this search engine on cms.gov. Click the search and it’s the very first link up here. You’ll click on that link and then you’ll scroll down a little bit where it says downloads. You can go to related links also, but right here, downloads 40B English, you’ll click on that and this will take you to the PDF that you need to fill out. Now, you can fill this out actually online, which will make it nice and clean, or you can just print it and fill it out handwritten.
Now, if it’s just you who’s going on Medicare, fine, you need one form for this and one form for the L564. But if it’s you and a spouse, you’ll need two for each. So you’ll print this out twice. You’ll fill one out and your spouse will fill one out if they’re past 65. It’s very simple. This one just states your Medicare number. You and your spouse, if you’re both past 65, you’ll have a Medicare number because you’ll have Medicare Part A, but you’ll want to get on Part B. So you’ll sign this, date it, and hold onto it.
The next one form is a little bit more complicated. So when you go to… Let’s see here. Where is CMS here? When you go to cms.gov, you’ll put in form L564. You’ll search that. Just like the other one, the first one here, you’ll click on. This has two forms to download, E and S. Basically I just go to this one right here, the related links, click on that. If you scroll down, it will have a downloadable form. It’ll look like this, and then down here as you see, it says download and print to PDF. So you can actually do the same thing. You can type in your information here and then you can download it to print it if you like, or you can just print it and then hand write it in here.
The thing about this L564, you’ll print this twice, but the person who’s working and getting the benefits, the first one they’ll fill out as the applicant and the employee, so their name will go on number four and line six. The social security number will be the same on line five and line seven here because they’re filling it out for themselves. And then the biggest thing is this start date, number two. Of course number one is going to be yes, your employer group health if that’s what you were. And then the date the applicant’s coverage began, this is going to have to be before you were eligible for Medicare. Let’s say you changed jobs three times, you’re going to have to go get this form filled out three different times by three different employers. This is why I say this process could take months. And even when you get this done, you’re going to fax it into a certain number. I’ll put it on the screen at the end, but you’ll want to start this a lot earlier than if you were just going on Medicare when you turn 65.
So you’ll fill out this form, you’ll have your employer down here. Sign it and date it, and then you’ll print it off. The one thing that I forgot to mention is you’ll have to print off a second one because it will be for the applicant, which would be your spouse. And then the employee, which would be you, they would fill out their applicant name, their social security number here, and then you, the employee, would fill out your name and your Social Security. So one would have the same applicant name and employee name. The other would have the spouse as the applicant name, and then the employee as the employee name with the different social security numbers.
Excuse me, you’ll already have it printed, but you’ll have your employer sign this and then you’ll fax it to a certain number. Now I’m going to put that number on the screen. Here is the fax number that you’ll fax it into. This is the national fax number. This is very important. Like I said, you’ll want to do this as early as possible. If you have broken coverage, you have to do this between January and March 31st. Your coverage will start in July. If you did not have broken coverage, you’ll get this filled out by every employer that you worked for after the age of 65. Hopefully it was just one. You’ll fill those four forms out, so 40B will be twice and L564 will be twice if you have a spouse, and then you’ll fax it into this phone number or this fax number.
