Medigap Switching Rights by U.S. Jurisdiction (2026): the restriction, not the window

Whether each of the 51 U.S. jurisdictions gives Medicare beneficiaries rights to buy or switch a Medigap policy without medical underwriting, beyond the federal minimum. Read from state insurance departments, statute sites and SHIP programs on 2026-08-03. The point of the dataset: almost every published summary of these state rules reports the window and stops. The window says when you may act; the restriction says whether acting is worth anything. A right to move to any equal-or-lesser plan from any carrier is a real annual opportunity to re-shop identical standardised coverage on price. A right to move only to the same plan letter with your current carrier is close to a formality. Both get called 'a birthday rule'. This dataset separates them. Verification is carried in the data: 26 of 51 rows are primary-source verified at high confidence; the rest are published marked rather than dropped, because in a table of states with extra rights an absent row reads as a claim that none exist. Insurance agencies, brokers and aggregators were excluded as sources of fact - this subject's search results are dominated by sites that sell the product, and their tables are where the restriction detail most often goes wrong.