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San Mateo, CA · San Mateo County

Medicare in San Mateo, where the county line changes the list.

San Mateo County has its own plan lineup and its own counseling office. Both are different from Santa Clara County, a few miles south.

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Michele Campbell, Owner & President at MC Insurance Services
Your California contactbased in Morgan HillMichele CampbellOwner & President(408) 848-2271

San Mateo County is its own Medicare market. That sounds like a technicality until you realize it decides which plans are even on your list, and that a friend fifteen minutes away may be looking at a completely different set.

Sixteen plans, approved for this county specifically

San Mateo County has 16 Medicare Advantage plans available for 2026. Santa Clara County also has 16, but they are approved separately, and the two lists are not interchangeable. Which one applies to you is decided by your home address. We do not offer every plan available in your area. Any information we provide is limited to those plans we do offer in your area. Please contact Medicare.gov or 1-800-MEDICARE to get information on all of your options.

The counseling office is different too

HICAP is statewide, but it is delivered by a separate nonprofit in each county. HICAP of San Mateo County serves San Mateo County residents and can be reached at 650-627-9350. Calling the Santa Clara office instead is a common and completely understandable mistake, and it costs you a phone call.

What we check first

  • The doctors and medical groups you want to keep, by name
  • Your prescriptions, since formularies differ plan to plan
  • Whether your current plan still does what it did when you chose it

The California birthday rule

If you already hold a Medigap policy, California gives you an annual window to switch to a comparable plan without medical underwriting. Full detail on our California birthday rule page.

A Question Worth Answering Directly

Does your doctor take this plan?

The honest answer depends on which kind of coverage you're comparing, since Medicare Advantage and Medicare Supplement work differently here.

A Medicare Advantage plan builds its own network of doctors and hospitals, structured as either an HMO or a PPO. An HMO generally requires you to stay inside that network and get a referral to see a specialist. A PPO gives you room to go outside the network, usually at a higher cost. Either way, a doctor being listed in a plan's network this year isn't a permanent fact. Provider directories can and do change during the year as doctors join or leave a plan, sometimes with little notice, so a listing from January isn't guaranteed to still be accurate by fall.

Original Medicare paired with a Medicare Supplement (Medigap) policy works differently. There's no network to check. You can generally see any doctor or hospital nationwide who accepts Medicare, which is the large majority of providers, without a referral.

You can check any plan's current network yourself, for free, using Medicare's own Medicare Plan Finder at medicare.gov/plan-compare. Enter your specific doctors and current prescriptions, and it shows which plans in your area actually include them, using the same data plans are required to keep current. We work from that same information when we compare plans for you, and we'll walk through what it shows either way.

San Mateo Medicare Questions
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A comparison for your county, not the one next door.

A free review of what San Mateo County actually offers, checked against the doctors you want to keep.

Schedule a Free Consultation(408) 848-2271