Reporting a death to Medicare

“How do I report a death to Medicare?”

First off, we are sorry for your loss. When you have a loved one that passed away usually the Funeral Home will submit a credit report of death to Social Security and intern, Social Security will report it to Medicare. You will then need to confirm with Medicare that the plan is cancelled. You will then be notified that person's Medicare is cancelled.

To report the death of a Medicare beneficiary, a family member or person responsible for the care of the beneficiary may call Social Security at 1-800-772-1213. You must have the beneficiary’s Social Security number available when you make this call. TTY users should call 1-800-325-0778.

However for the private insurance companies (supplement the advantage or drug plans) in many cases they do get alerted as well as part of that process. The plans will be automatically cancelled but just to be sure we've seen cases where this may linger for awhile and the premium schemes the outcome, so to be safe the easiest way is to call the insurance company to alert them of the death. Usually, the insurance company will ask to provide some type of proof which is a death certificate or an obituary and that would ensure that the policies are canceled out appropriately.