Most Seniors Spend Little Time Researching Medicare Before Picking Plan

A majority of older adults in the U.S. spend very little time researching Medicare policies before choosing their annual health coverage, a new poll finds.

Three out of 5 senior citizens spend less than an hour before enrolling in their Medicare coverage each year during Open Enrollment, according to a National Poll on Healthy Aging from the University of Michigan Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation (IHPI) released Thursday. This 60 percent of older adults includes 33 percent who spent less than an hour reviewing their policy plan and 27 percent who did not review their options at all.

A member from the IHPI did not provide the Daily Caller News Foundation with comment in time publication.

The poll’s findings demonstrate a need for older adults, especially those who are dissatisfied with current coverage, to thoroughly review their options before reapplying, Geoffrey Hoffman an associate professor at University of Michigan and IHPI member said in the poll’s news announcement from the IHPI.

“It’s easy to ‘set it and forget it’ with Medicare, especially if you have coverage that you like and assume is the best that’s out there,” Hoffman said. “The number of choices, and the tools for navigating them, can also be confusing, but there may be coverage that better suits your needs and wallet.”

Four out of 5 of the polled senior citizens said they stuck with their Medicare coverage from the previous year, according to the poll. A quarter of those who reported reviewing their options before selecting a plan, consulted the plan-finding tool on the Medicare website or the Medicare hotline during their Open Enrollment. This year, the period for all forms of 2027 Medicare coverage runs from Oct. 15 to Dec. 7.

Open Enrollment began Thursday, the day the poll was released.

Poll findings come from nationally represented data collected by NORC at the University of Chicago, who conducted the survey for IHPI from Dec. 30, 2025 to Jan. 12, 2026. The survey was administered online and by phone to a randomly selected group of 3,194 adults across the United States, between the ages of 50 and 98. Completion rate was 73 percent and margin of error was 1 to 2 percentage points for questions asked. The specific data results from the report came from a subsample of 1,796 adults and weighted to reflect the 65 and older population.

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