In the spring of 2024, Deborah Antoine’s mother was not well.
To help manage her mother’s care, Ms. Antoine set up a grueling routine of drives between St. Louis, where she lived, and Texas, where her mother was. She made the 12-hour trip every week, either down or back, staying in Texas for a week at a time.
And because she’s a careful person who doesn’t like imposing on her neighbors, she didn’t want to ask anyone to take in her mail. Instead, she tried to put a hold on it. When that didn’t work, she got a post office box near her home and filled out a change-of-address form online.
That change of address seems to have caused a cascading series of problems. In early 2025, months after her mother died and Ms. Antoine was back home in Missouri full time, she went to the doctor and discovered that she had no longer had Medicare coverage.
How did this happen?
It isn’t 100 percent clear. The federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services won’t comment on individual cases, even when people like Ms. Antoine are willing to sign release forms granting permission. But there are some things that everyone else can learn from Ms. Antoine’s saga — and a few to-dos for people who are frequently away from their primary residence.
Let’s start with the Postal Service. When Ms. Antoine began traveling to and from Texas, she put those holds on her mail. Her post office should have hung on to it while she was away.
But mail, including prescription drugs, kept coming to her house. Local postal workers told her that using holds in this way was ineffective, in part because any substitute mail carriers wouldn’t know to check the list of people with holds on their mail. “It’s not for your convenience,” Ms. Antoine said she had been told.
Instead, she said a local manager had told her, she needed to get a post office box. She did that and filled out a change-of-address form while setting the box up.
All along, Ms. Antoine, 66, was paying her Medicare premiums automatically from her bank account (and not through Social Security withholding, since she was not collecting Social Security yet). She also had separate Medicare Advantage coverage through a company called Essence Healthcare. There, too, she paid in full each month, automatically.
When her mother died in August 2024, Ms. Antoine got rid of the post office box and changed her address back to her home. Her life returned to normal, or so she thought. The next February, while visiting the dermatologist, she was told by a person at the doctor’s office that she had no insurance coverage.
“I’m standing there feeling like the ground is shifting,” Ms. Antoine said. “I’ve never been an uninsured person in my adult life, even in the years between retirement and Medicare.”
She had not received any cancellation notices via paper mail, email, phone call or text message, although a Medicare phone representative later told her that she should have received paper mail notifying her.
After getting the various parties to reinstate her coverage, she went back into her bank records. There, she saw that Medicare had stopped drawing on her bank account at a certain point — presumably when her coverage ceased — and she had simply missed it. You might have missed it as well, if you had a double-digit number of billers pulling from your account on the regular.
After weeks of detective work — and a few months of old mail trickling into her home mailbox — Ms. Antoine could only surmise the following: Somewhere along the way, mail from Medicare must have gone back to wherever it had come from, such that some computer or person decided, for some unknown reason, to cut her off.
Is she right? We begin with the Postal Service, where a spokeswoman said that holding her mail should have worked in the first place, and that substitute carriers were supposed to get training on how to deal with held mail.
Then there is this weird catch: The government (that’s the Post Office) might not forward government mail (that’s Medicare).
“In some cases, mailers, including government agencies, place forwarding restrictions on mail pieces to protect sensitive personal information,” the spokeswoman said via email. “When those endorsements are present, the Postal Service is obligated to follow the instructions provided by the sender.”
At that point, some unforwardable mail may undergo additional processing in a postal facility and still reach its intended destination eventually.
Does mail from Medicare have forwarding restrictions that would have prevented Ms. Antoine from getting any cancellation notices via her post office box? It’s still not clear, though a spokesman said a change of address would not cause someone to lose coverage. You might lose it if you didn’t pay your premium, but that wasn’t what happened here.
The spokesman added that last May — when it was too late to help Ms. Antoine — Medicare’s correspondence team began making phone calls and setting alerts on inbound calls to better communicate with people whose postal mail had bounced back to Medicare mailing centers.
As for Essence, the Medicare Advantage provider — which could have sent up its own flares beyond a paper mail notice when it found out that Ms. Antoine had lost her Medicare coverage — a spokesman said that the company had to cancel her Medicare Advantage coverage when she no longer had Medicare and that it had done all it could.
“Medicare Advantage communication and marketing regulations place limits on contacting beneficiaries who have disenrolled or are in the process of disenrolling, except for limited purposes such as quality improvement surveys,” the spokesman said in a statement.
That bit about quality improvement is ironic, right? Ms. Antoine would like a word.
So what, if anything, can you do to avoid this situation? Start by watching your bank and credit card statements extremely carefully. We probably all need to retrain ourselves to look for charges that should be there, in addition to ones from fraudsters that should not.
The spokesman for Essence added that it might have emailed Ms. Antoine if only she had requested such contact when she was enrolling, or done so at some subsequent date. Ms. Antoine said she surely would have done this when signing up if she had noticed such an option. And when she went to do it recently, the email and phone options were grayed out on the website. She had to call to fix it.
Anyone changing his or her U.S. mail address should make sure to take both analog and digital measures to let the Social Security Administration and, if applicable, the Medicare authorities know where to reach you. Use their websites. Call them, too, for good measure. And double-check online to make sure the change has stuck. Do the same thing, manually, with all the billers you deal with, in case they also have mail-forwarding restrictions.
Ron Lieber has been the Your Money columnist since 2008 and has written five books, most recently “The Price You Pay for College.”
The post When Changing Your Address Leads to Losing Your Medicare Coverage appeared first on New York Times.
