Your Premera Blue Cross Medicare Advantage plan includes a yearly preventive-care visit with your primary care doctor, covered at 100%. This exam is specifically designed to help people 65 and older create a comprehensive health protection plan with their doctor and update it year after year.
The Premera Annual Wellness Visit includes:
- Review of your family and medical history, current medical conditions, and ongoing treatment plans, including medications.
- Discussion of age-related concerns such as depression, memory loss or cognitive impairment, balance, and fall prevention.
Your provider may recommend and/or refer you to the following procedures as a result of your annual wellness visit. (Note: You may have to pay some of the charges for these procedures).
- Immunizations for flu and pneumonia.
- Lab work, as necessary.
- Screenings for conditions of particular concern to seniors, including high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, colon and other cancers, osteoporosis, and glaucoma.
While the Annual Wellness Visit is important for everyone, it’s especially important if you have recently selected a new doctor and haven’t had an Annual Wellness Visit within the past 12 months. The visit will give your new doctor the opportunity to become familiar with your current health and medical history. It will also allow you to develop a dialogue about your health.
Call your primary care doctor and ask to schedule a Premera Annual Wellness Visit. This will make sure you are allotted the correct amount of time to create your preventive care plan from head to toe.
Preventive vs. Diagnostic
Some common medical services can be preventive or diagnostic. Ask your doctor before any tests whether they are preventive or diagnostic.
Your doctor may recommend screening tests that are not considered preventive. Some tests are considered preventive when they are given before a condition is suspected, but diagnostic if a condition is suspected or has already been diagnosed.
Your health plan will still cover many of these screenings, but you may be responsible for paying for part of the cost of a diagnostic test, depending on the copays and coinsurance in your health plan.
For example, if you have your first cholesterol test, that would be considered preventive. But if that test detected an unhealthy cholesterol level that needed to be monitored over time, subsequent follow-up testing would be considered diagnostic.
Premera Blue Cross is an HMO and HMO-POS plan with a Medicare contract. Enrollment in Premera Blue Cross depends on contract renewal. The benefit information provided is a brief summary, not a complete description of benefits. For more information, contact the plan. Limitations, copayments and restrictions may apply. Benefits, formulary, pharmacy network, provider network, premium and/or copayments/coinsurance may change on January 1 of each year.
