Editorial Policy

Our drafting process is AI-assisted and human-reviewed. We use large language models to produce first drafts from a brief and a set of verified source figures, and a person reviews every draft before it is published. Nothing reaches this site on the strength of a model's output alone.

We disclose this because you deserve to know how the words in front of you were made. AI is a drafting tool here, not an authority — the accuracy obligation stays with us.

Program rules and dollar figures come from primary sources: the CMS Medicare & You handbook, CMS fact sheets and regulations, and the Social Security Administration's program rules, including the POMS manual for income and resource limits.

We do not source figures from other Medicare websites, including our competitors. Where a state agency is the authority — as with Medigap rules, which genuinely differ by state — we go to that state's department of insurance.

Every piece of generated content runs through an automated compliance check before a human ever sees it. That check looks for prohibited marketing patterns, missing required disclaimers, and claims we are not permitted to make as a TPMO.

The check fails closed. If it cannot confirm a piece is compliant — including when the automated reviewer itself errors — the content is blocked rather than published. We would rather ship nothing than ship something that misleads a reader about their coverage.

Medicare premiums, deductibles, and income thresholds change every year, and stale numbers are the most common way a Medicare site quietly becomes wrong.

Every dated figure on this site lives in one place in our codebase with the date it was last verified and links to the source it came from. We refresh them annually when CMS and SSA publish the new year's amounts. If you find a figure that looks out of date, it is a bug and we want to hear about it.

When we get something wrong, we fix the page rather than quietly deleting it, and where the error could have affected a decision, we say what changed.

To report an error, call us and ask for the editorial team, or raise it in the community. Tell us the page and what you believe is incorrect. We check reader-reported errors against the primary source, not against our own previous wording.