Medicare Open Enrollment for 2027 coverage opened on October 15, 2026, and closes on December 7, 2026, the window the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced on September 28, 2026, alongside a projection that the weighted average Medicare Advantage premium will fall from $14.37 a month in 2026 to $12.00 in 2027. The premium is the small number; the large one is the plan's maximum out-of-pocket amount, or MOOP, and CMS has capped it for 2027 at $9,850 for in-network care and $14,800 for in-network and out-of-network care combined. A plan with drug coverage adds a separate Part D limit of $2,400, so the $9,850 figure now circulating as the 2027 Medicare Advantage limit is one of three ceilings, and for a PPO member who sees out-of-network doctors it is not the one that ends the year's spending. Both MOOP figures are maximums, not the amount on a given plan. Plans pick a number at or below them in one of three tiers, set by a CMS memo dated April 22, 2026, u...
A household files, and the return shows a balance due of $810 that no payroll office caused and no payroll office was required to withhold against. Nothing was miswithheld. Both employers followed the rule in front of them to the letter. The 0.9 percent Additional Medicare Tax simply runs on two different numbers at once, and the number the employer uses is not the number the return uses. The employer's number is $200,000. It is a per-employer figure, tested against the wages that one employer pays in one calendar year. The return's number depends on filing status: $250,000 on a joint return, $125,000 on a separate return, $200,000 in every remaining case. Those two numbers agree for exactly one taxpayer, the single filer with one job, and they diverge for everybody else. This is the kind of gap that produces a surprise in April rather than an error in payroll. The statute wrote the withholding trigger and the liability threshold in separate places, using separate tests, an...