Free Medicare cost help by borough in New York City

If you live in New York City and have Medicare, the programs that can lower what you pay (the Medicare Savings Programs, Extra Help, and EPIC) are applied for through a small number of doors: the city's Human Resources Administration for Medicaid and the Medicare Savings Programs, Social Security for Extra Help, and the state EPIC program for people 65 and older. Free counseling on all of it comes from HIICAP. This section explains how those doors work from each borough and, in Queens, from individual neighborhoods.

Medicare and Medicaid paperwork uses county names, and in New York City the county is not always the name you use every day. When a form or a phone recording asks for your county, this is the answer:

The statewide HIICAP line asks for your county before it routes your call. Saying the borough name usually works, but "Kings," "New York," and "Richmond" are what the records use.

Outside the city, Medicaid and the Medicare Savings Programs are handled by each county's Department of Social Services. Inside the five boroughs, one agency, the NYC Human Resources Administration (HRA), does that job for everyone. There is no Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, or Staten Island Medicaid phone line to track down. Every borough page on this site points to the same HRA Medicaid Helpline, and to nyc.gov/hra for the current list of Medicaid office locations, because office addresses and hours change more often than this site does.

People who are 65 or older, people with a disability, and people who already have Medicare apply to HRA rather than through NY State of Health. That is the group this site is written for.

Each borough page explains how HRA and HIICAP work from that part of the city, lists the NYC Aging in-person counseling sites on the citywide listing, gives a document checklist for a Medicare Savings Program application, and names a few hospitals and civic buildings purely for orientation. Neighborhood pages go one level deeper: approximate ZIP codes, the closest counseling site by bus or train, what usually happens after you call, and mistakes that are common in that particular place.