Who writes this, and how it is paid for

You have almost certainly landed on a Medicare website that felt helpful until the moment it asked for your phone number. This page exists so you can tell, before you read another word of ours, exactly where our money comes from and what it would take to change what we write.

No commissions. We never ask for your phone number. Your numbers stay in your browser.

What we do not take

We take no commissions. We take no referral fees. We take no money from any insurance carrier, agency, broker, or plan — not for a mention, not for a link, not for a place in a list. We have no relationship with any broker, so there is no broker we could send you to even if we wanted to.

We do not sell insurance. We are not a licensed insurance agency, we are not a marketing organization for one, and we are not going to become either. That is not modesty about our size. The moment a website earns money when you enroll in a particular plan, everything it writes about plans has to be read differently, and we would rather keep the right to write plainly than have that income.

We never ask for your phone number — not on a form, not in exchange for a worksheet, not to unlock a result. There is no field for it anywhere on this site. If you ever see one, it is not us.

How the site is paid for

Display advertising, and nothing else. Advertisements are bought through an ad network the same way they are on a newspaper site: the advertiser buys space, not coverage. No advertiser sees a page before it is published, none can request a change to one, and none has ever been told what we are working on. If an advertiser asked us to soften a page, we would decline and the ad would go — which is a cheap promise to make only because we have made sure it stays a cheap promise to keep.

Advertising also has hard limits here on how it may behave. Nothing on this site is designed to look like a result, a recommendation, or a government notice, and no advertisement is placed inside a calculator's answer.

We do not help you pick a plan, and here is why

We explain what Medicare costs, how the parts fit together, and how a decision you are weighing tends to play out. We do not recommend, rank, score, or compare specific plans or carriers, and we never will. Plan choice depends on your doctors, your prescriptions, your pharmacy, and where you live, and it changes every year — which is exactly the kind of question a national website should hand to someone who can look at your actual situation.

So plan choice always goes to the same three places, none of which pay us anything:

• Medicare Plan Finder (medicare.gov) — the official tool, with your own drug list and pharmacy.
• 1-800-MEDICARE (1-800-633-4227) — the government's own line, open around the clock.
• Your state SHIP — free, unbiased counseling — your State Health Insurance Assistance Program, known as SHIP.

Why we send you to free counseling when commercial sites do not

Every state runs a SHIP — the State Health Insurance Assistance Program — which gives free, one-to-one Medicare counseling from people who are not paid on commission and do not sell anything. They will sit with your drug list and your plan letters and work through them with you. It is one of the best-kept secrets in American health coverage, and the reason it stays a secret is straightforward: a website funded by plan enrollments has no reason to tell you about the free counselor who might steer you somewhere it earns nothing.

We earn nothing from your plan decision in the first place, so we can point you at the best help available rather than the help that pays. You can find your state's program at shiphelp.org or by calling 877-839-2675. If you are not sure who to call for the question you actually have, we built a page that walks you to the right door.

The byline: Written, Edited, Reviewed

Pages here carry a three-part byline so you can see how much scrutiny a page has actually had — not a vague "our team" credit.

Plenty of health and money websites print a reviewer's name and photograph on a page that professional never meaningfully touched. An empty slot, stated openly, tells you more than a credential we have not earned. What we can show you instead is where every figure came from and when it was checked, which is the part a reviewer would be checking anyway — see our methodology and our sources.

Corrections

When we find an error, or you find one for us, we fix the page and then we write the mistake down in public: what was wrong, which page it was on, why it happened, and the date it was fixed. We do not edit a figure quietly and move on. Serious errors — a wrong dollar amount, a wrong deadline, a wrong eligibility rule — get a note on the page itself as well as an entry in the log.

The log is at thewisesenior.com/corrections, and you can report something at our contact page. Tell us the page and the figure that looks wrong; you do not need to know what the right answer is for the report to be useful.

What this site is not

It is education, not advice. Nothing here is financial, tax, legal, or insurance advice, and no calculator on this site can determine your actual benefit, premium, or eligibility — only the agency responsible for it can do that, which is why every tool links to the official source it was built from. The Wise Senior is a private, independent website with no connection to Medicare, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the Social Security Administration, or any other government agency.