What to Bring to a Medicare Appointment — and What the Agent Owes You

The five things to bring

• **Your red, white and blue Medicare card** — the agent needs your Part A and B effective dates, which are printed on it.
• **Your complete drug list** — generic names, dosages, and how often you take each. The label on the bottle has all three.
• **Your pharmacy's name** — the same plan prices the same drug differently by pharmacy, so this changes real numbers.
• **Your doctors and hospital, by name** — network checks only work against specific names, not "my doctor in Cheyenne."
• **Your current plan's Annual Notice of Change, if you have one** — it lists exactly what your plan is changing, which is usually the reason for the meeting in the first place.

The Scope of Appointment form, translated

Before a Medicare sales appointment, federal rules require you to sign a Scope of Appointment — usually at least 48 hours in advance. People find it strange to sign something before a meeting has happened, so here is what it actually is.

It is a topic list, not a contract. It records which product types you agreed to discuss — say, Medicare Advantage and Part D — and the agent may not pitch anything outside it. Agreed to discuss drug plans? They cannot steer the meeting into an annuity. It creates no obligation to enroll in anything, and it is one of the few pieces of Medicare paperwork that exists purely for your protection.

The 48-hour rule has narrow exceptions — you can waive it if the meeting is genuinely your idea on short notice, and it does not apply the same way during the last days of an enrollment window. But an agent who treats the form as an annoying formality to rush past is telling you something about how they treat the rest of the rules.

What a legitimate appointment looks like

A few things happen by rule in a compliant Medicare appointment, and their absence is diagnostic:

• **No cold call started it.** Agents may not call you uninvited about Medicare plans. If the relationship began with an unsolicited call, that is already a violation.
• **Phone calls about plans are recorded.** CMS requires third-party marketing organizations to record sales calls. An agent avoiding the recording is avoiding the rule.
• **You hear the disclaimer.** Agents who do not represent every plan must say so — the words "we do not offer every plan available in your area" are required, not modesty.
• **No pressure to sign today.** Enrollment windows are weeks long. "This deal ends today" is not how Medicare works, ever.

Questions worth asking the agent

Three questions sort agents quickly. *How many carriers do you represent?* — fewer than three or four means you are seeing a narrow slice of the market. *Are you paid differently depending on which plan I pick?* — carrier commissions for the same product type are standardized by CMS caps, and an honest agent explains that plainly. *What happens after I enroll?* — the answer tells you whether they disappear until next commission season.

And one for yourself afterward: does what they showed you match what Medicare's own Plan Finder shows for your ZIP code? Ten minutes of checking is the cheapest second opinion there is. The pushiest marketing tactics have their own guide — how to spot Medicare marketing scams — worth reading before the fall ad season starts.