Although a broader window for Medicare enrollment has closed, some retirees have another opportunity to make changes to their coverage.

Medicare Advantage open enrollment is available from Jan. 1 through March 31.

Medicare Advantage plans are offered by private insurers as an alternative to original Medicare. Generally, Medicare Advantage may cover Medicare Parts A and B, as well as Medicare Part D prescription drug coverage and other potential extra benefits.

During this open enrollment period, individuals who are already enrolled in a Medicare Advantage plan may switch to another Medicare Advantage plan. Alternatively, they may drop their current Medicare Advantage plan and opt for Medicare original coverage.

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To be sure, there will be more options later in the year during a broader open enrollment period that lasts from October to December, when Medicare original enrollees may also opt to change plans.

For beneficiaries who are eligible to make changes during this time, it’s important not to ignore this window, according to Juliette Cubanski, deputy director of the program on Medicare policy at KFF, a provider of health policy research.

“Plans can change considerably from one year to the next,” Cubanski said. “If people don’t compare their coverage to other options, they may not know that they’re going to be faced with higher costs.”

To be sure, Medicare Advantage plans have received negative attention because in some cases coverage was denied for necessary care.

Medicare Advantage plans are more likely than traditional Medicare to use prior authorization, approval needed before a patient can receive certain services or medications. However, because prior authorizations that have been denied are frequently overturned when they are appealed, that has prompted questions as to whether the plans are avoiding coverage obligations.

Medicare Advantage plans are more likely than original Medicare to offer extra benefits — such as dental, vision and hearing — that elderly beneficiaries need.

Most Medicare beneficiaries — 83% — consider supplemental benefits to be important to their coverage, according to a recent survey from The Commonwealth Fund, a provider of independent research on health care issues.

Notably, a larger share of Medicare Advantage enrollees — 89% — said supplemental benefits are important to them, versus 74% of traditional Medicare enrollees, The Commonwealth Fund found.

“People on Medicare, both older adults and those with disabilities, generally really need dental, hearing and vision services, as well as other benefits that are typically offered by Medicare Advantage plans,” said Gretchen Jacobson, vice president of Medicare at The Commonwealth Fund.

Beneficiaries who are in traditional Medicare may not have coverage for those same services unless they are able to purchase a supplemental plan or they qualify for Medicaid, Jacobson said.

State-based organizations — the State Health Insurance Program, or SHIP — provide assistance to Medicare beneficiaries to help sort through their plan options.

Unlike insurance brokers or other professionals, these organizations do not have a financial interest to sign people up for certain plans, Cubanski said.

A federal judge in Maryland on Monday granted a temporary restraining order barring staffers from Elon Musk‘s secretive government-slashing effort, the Department of Government Efficiency, from accessing the personal information of millions of student loan borrowers.

The order, issued by Judge Deborah Boardman, ruled that the Department of Education and the Office of Personnel Management — the government’s HR department — must stop sharing federal employees’ and student borrowers’ personal data with DOGE officials. It marks a significant limitation on DOGE’s access to Americans’ personal data.

Boardman’s order bars DOGE from the personal information at the Education Department until March 10 at 8 a.m.

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Workers for DOGE have entered government offices in recent weeks, looking to make deep cuts to federal spending.

Boardman’s order came in response to a lawsuit led by The American Federation of Teachers, a union representing 1.8 million members. The AFT sued several federal agencies, including the Education Department, for permitting DOGE access to individuals’ private data.

AFT president Randi Weingarten applauded Boardman’s decision.

“When people give their financial and other personal information to the federal government — namely to secure financial aid for their kids to go to college, or to get a student loan — they expect that data to be protected and used for the reasons it was intended,” Weingarten said.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request from CNBC for comment.

There are currently six DOGE “affiliates” working at the Education Department, according to the court order. DOGE has claimed that it needed access to student loan programs to investigate waste, fraud and abuse, Boardman said.

However, the judge said the order that the government didn’t explain why DOGE affiliates at the Education Department “need such comprehensive, sweeping access to the plaintiffs’ records to audit student loan programs.”

Boardman expressed concern that DOGE had access to people’s income information and Social Security numbers.

And she wrote that the plaintiffs would likely be successful in their claim that the Education Department’s disclosure of their records to DOGE staffers violates The Privacy Act, a federal law that applies to federal agencies and is meant to protect individuals’ personal information.

“The data in question includes really sensitive information on a population of people who had to give that information for one clear purpose: borrow money to get an education,” said Ben Winters, the director of artificial intelligence and privacy at the Consumer Federation of America.

“It’s crucial that institutions like governments only allow your data to be used for strictly the purpose you gave it for,” Winters said.

The Trump administration’s purge of federal workers may ultimately amount to the biggest job cut in U.S. history, which is likely to have ramifications for the economy, especially at the local level, according to economists.

The White House, with the help of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, has fired or offered buyouts to workers across the federal government, the nation’s largest employer.

While the precise scale of the job cuts is as yet unclear, evidence suggests it’s at least in the tens of thousands so far, economists said.

The Trump administration directed federal agencies to dismiss “probationary” employees. Probationary workers are more-recent hires who have been with the federal government for only a year or two and who do not yet have full civil service protections.

There were about 220,000 federal employees with less than a year of tenure as of May 2024, according to the most recent data from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management.

Additionally, more than 75,000 federal workers have accepted a buyout offer, according to a Trump administration official. They agreed to resign but get paid through September.

The total of these two groups — nearly 300,000 workers — would make these actions amount to the “largest job cut in American history (by a mile),” Callie Cox, chief market strategist at Ritholtz Wealth Management, wrote Tuesday.

That sum doesn’t include others who may be on the chopping block, such as contractors who work at the U.S. Agency for International Development. Career civil servants who got promotions in the past year are also at risk of losing their jobs, since they’re technically on probation in their new role, Jesse Rothstein, a public policy and economics professor at University of California, Berkeley, said in a podcast Thursday.

Job cuts have come from across the government, at agencies including the Internal Revenue Service, National Park Service, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the departments of Agriculture, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, and Veterans Affairs, according to the Associated Press.

“We may soon find out the hard way that people drive the U.S. economy,” Cox wrote.

For example, there may be some crossover: Probationary workers who would have been fired may have accepted a buyout. Also, in some cases, the Trump administration tried hiring back workers who’d been terminated.

Public disclosures show more than 26,000 federal workers have already been fired, excluding buyouts, according to a research note Wednesday from investment bank Piper Sandler.

That’s about the same number of workers who lost their jobs when Lehman Brothers collapsed during the 2008 financial crisis, for example.

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But Thomas Ryan, a North America economist at Capital Economics, estimates that between 100,000 and 200,000 federal staffers have probably already been let go.

That would handily beat IBM’s 1993 purge of 60,000 workers, thought to be the largest corporate layoff in U.S. history. Among other notable corporate cuts, Citigroup and Sears, Roebuck & Co. each slashed about 50,000 jobs, in 2008 and 1993, respectively.

“Certainly if all 200,000-plus probationary workers are fired [without replacement] that would be historic,” Susan Houseman, senior economist at the nonpartisan W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, wrote in an e-mail.

Even among prior federal layoffs, the scale of potential cuts appears unprecedented, experts said.

The U.S. Army, for example, eliminated 50,000 jobs in September 2011 as former President Barack Obama withdrew troops from Afghanistan and Iraq, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The U.S. Air Force announced plans in 2005 to reduce head count by 40,000, the firm said.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracked data on federal mass layoffs from 1995 to 2003. During that period, mass layoffs affected anywhere from roughly 9,000 federal workers per year to 23,000 a year, the data show.

If the current federal job cuts “are not historic yet, it feels like we’re headed in that direction pretty quickly,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s.

The White House didn’t comment on the specific scale of cuts.  

“President Trump and his administration are delivering on the American people’s mandate to eliminate wasteful spending and make federal agencies more efficient, which includes removing probationary employees who are not mission critical,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, said in a written statement. “This is part of President Trump’s sweeping effort to save taxpayer dollars, cut wasteful spending, and restore our broken economy.”

Affected workers who can’t quickly find new jobs may be forced to make ends meet without regular income. Unemployment benefits may offer a temporary stopgap to eligible workers, but they replace only about a third of prior wages, on average, according to Labor Department data.

The majority of workers who suffer job loss are affected long term, as they have trouble finding new full-time jobs and subsequently earn less money, according to a 2016 research paper by Henry Farber, professor emeritus of economics at Princeton University, who studied data from 1981 to 2015.

“There are economic impacts to [laid-off workers], their families, to the businesses they would have bought goods and services from,” said Erica Groshen, a senior economics advisor at Cornell University and former commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“The economic consequences of layoffs are like a domino effect that spread across local economies to businesses that seem to have no connection whatsoever to the federal government,” said Ernie Tedeschi, director of economics at the Yale University Budget Lab.

Laid-off workers may spend less at businesses such as local coffee shops, restaurants and day care facilities, he said.

There’s a psychological factor to mass layoffs, too, economists said. Other federal workers, fearful for their jobs, may pull back on spending and delay big-ticket purchases. Businesses with ties to the federal government or the federal workforce may stop hiring and investing due to uncertainty.

Washington, D.C., for example, is expected to suffer a “meaningful” increase in unemployment that would push the capital into a “mild recession,” Adam Kamins and Justin Begley, economists at Moody’s, wrote in a note Tuesday.

Close to 100,000 federal government positions will be eliminated or moved from Washington in the next couple of years, Kamins and Begley estimate. A “flood” of job applicants will limit the private sector’s ability to absorb them into the labor pool, they said.

The economies of Maryland and Virginia won’t suffer to the same degree but will be “materially” hurt due to their exposure to government employment, Kamins and Begley wrote.

Layoffs aren’t likely to show up in federal data for another month, and not until September for those who take the severance deal, according to Piper Sandler. Unemployment claims in Washington, D.C., for the week ended Feb. 8 were up 36% from the prior week.