This article is about what’s actually happening with Medigap premiums in 2026, what’s changing in Medicare’s diabetes coverage (some of it genuinely good), and the financial assistance programs that thousands of older adults with T1D qualify for but never use because no one tells them about them.
Brian got type 1 diabetes when he was seven. He long feared one of his three children might face the same fate––until one did. His son Owen got T1D just past his eighth birthday. Brian is a clinical exercise physiologist and diabetes educator by training, cares for his three children, lives with type 1 and Owen’s type 1, and has helped start a branch of a grass roots diabetes meet up in his hometown of Philadelphia, GrownUp T1Ds. What’s it like with all that on your plate? Brian says he takes it one day at a time, with lots of coffee.
These days, as Ms. Wintour wrote in the magazine, “I feel age is actually an advantage.” Or so it is beginning to seem in fashion. According to data from the fashion search engine Tagwalk, 5 percent of the top 20 brands included at least one curve, or plus-size, model in their runway shows, but 100 percent included an older model.
Dr. Mark Heyman, PhD, CDCES, is a diabetes psychologist and Certified Diabetes Care and Education Specialist who has lived with T1D since 1999. He is the founder of the Center for Diabetes & Mental Health (CDMH) in San Diego, specializing in evidence-based mental health support and emotional challenges for people with diabetes. Mark’s practice and programs are focused on helping people with T1D address the emotional burden, burnout, and fear associated with the condition.
Qualifying for Medicaid’s long-term care coverage requires very low income and minimal assets: an unplanned long-term stay can drain a family’s resources within a couple of years. Eldercare experts recommend a strategy known as a Medicaid “spend down” — systematically and transparently using a person’s assets on appropriate expenses (like prepaying for a funeral, paying down a mortgage, or covering nursing home costs out of pocket) to reach Medicaid eligibility sooner.