The Federal Trade Commission has called a public roundtable for September 29, 2026, aimed squarely at the scams that spike every fall around Medicare and Affordable Care Act open enrollment. The one-hour virtual session runs from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern and pairs FTC staff with officials from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the State Health Insurance Assistance Program network and Senior Medicare Patrol. The timing tracks the calendar on purpose: Medicare’s enrollment window opens sixteen days later, on October 15, exactly when complaints about fake health plans and stolen Medicare numbers typically climb.
A Federal Panel Built Around the Enrollment Calendar
The FTC listed the session under its formal title, “Consumer Protection and Older Adults Roundtable: Healthcare-related Scams Before, During, and After Open Enrollment Season,” with a start time of 1 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, September 29. The agency’s Bureau of Consumer Protection is hosting it over Zoom, open to any member of the public who joins with the meeting ID and passcode posted on the listing, and the session is structured as a one-hour panel discussion rather than a lecture or a press briefing.
Four named panelists carry the hour. Brandy Bauer, director of the SMP and SHIP Resource Centers, represents the network of free counselors who help enrollees compare plans; Matthew Schiltz, an FTC attorney, speaks for the agency’s enforcement side; and two Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services officials, Dennis Sendros of its Audits and Vulnerabilities Group and Gina Zdanowicz, who directs CMS’s Marketplace Plan Management Group, cover the federal programs scammers most often impersonate. Gema de las Heras, a consumer education specialist at the FTC, moderates, and the agency’s event listing states the discussion will be recorded and posted publicly afterward.
The order of the first hour: After a scam call or a stolen account number, which call gets made first decides how much is recoverable. See the first-hour recovery plan in The Senior Fraud Defense & First-Hour Recovery Kit.
Why Scams Cluster Around Medicare’s Enrollment Window
Medicare’s Annual Enrollment Period runs from October 15 through December 7 this year, the single stretch when most beneficiaries can switch Medicare Advantage or Part D drug plans for the coming year, according to Medicare.gov. That compressed calendar is exactly what the FTC’s panel is built around: the agency’s own description of the session says scammers “work overtime” during open enrollment for both Medicare and the Health Insurance Marketplace, using the deadline pressure to push fake coverage or harvest personal data before a beneficiary can compare it against a real plan.
The FTC’s agenda for the roundtable covers three areas drawn directly from its event description: how the current run of Medicare and health-insurance scams operate, how older adults and their families can detect and shut them down before money changes hands, and where to find free, government-vetted help comparing coverage instead of relying on an unsolicited caller or a mailer designed to look official. Each topic maps to one agency on the panel: CMS for coverage rules, SHIP for free counseling, and SMP for fraud detection.
Health insurance scams that ride the enrollment calendar typically take one of a few forms: a caller claiming to represent Medicare who asks for a Medicare number or bank account to “reactivate” coverage, marketing that sells a plan covering almost nothing once a beneficiary tries to use it, and identity theft that lets someone else bill Medicare using a stolen number. Each version converts a real deadline, the enrollment window closing December 7, into a reason to act before checking with a SHIP counselor or CMS directly.
Beneficiaries who suspect they have already been targeted do not need to wait for the September 29 session to act. The FTC’s fraud-reporting portal, ReportFraud.ftc.gov, takes complaints year-round and feeds them into the same enforcement pipeline Schiltz works from, and a complaint that names a caller’s phone number, a plan name or a mailer’s return address gives investigators the clearest path to matching one report to a pattern already under review.
Where the Panel Points Older Adults for Free Help
SHIP counselors, funded through the same federal network Bauer directs, offer one-on-one, unbiased plan comparisons at no charge in every state, the kind of review the FTC’s panel is positioning as the alternative to a scam call. Senior Medicare Patrol volunteers, the other program represented on the panel, specialize in the fraud side: spotting charges for equipment or services a beneficiary never received and helping file the paperwork to dispute them with Medicare directly.
The FTC maintains an ongoing library of scam alerts aimed at older adults, cataloged on its consumer-advice site, that the agency updates as new schemes surface, including impersonation calls, fake prize notices and romance scams that chase the same kind of financial-account access a healthcare scam is after. The September 29 panel adds a healthcare-specific, enrollment-timed session to that library rather than replacing it, and the agency says the recording will stand as a public reference once the discussion has aired.
The FTC has not yet said when the recording will be posted or whether written materials from CMS, SHIP and SMP will accompany it, leaving the September 29 broadcast itself, moderated by Gema de las Heras, as the primary record of what four federal and federally funded specialists tell the public about this year’s open enrollment scams.
The Hour After a Scam Call
The FTC’s September 29 panel walks through how Medicare and Marketplace scams work and where to find a SHIP counselor, but the discussion is built for prevention, not for the minutes right after a call has already gone wrong. A person who realizes mid-call that a supposed CMS representative asked for a Medicare number or bank information still has to freeze a card, alert family and document what was said, in some order, before the panel’s advice about spotting a scam becomes useful again.
The Senior Fraud Defense & First-Hour Recovery Kit is a 9-page kit built around the first-hour recovery plan and a family code word that lets relatives verify each other before money moves.
Open the first-hour recovery plan in The Senior Fraud Defense & First-Hour Recovery Kit.
This article was researched and drafted with the assistance of AI and reviewed by The Money Overview editorial team.
