Preventive care · Montrose County, Colorado · 2026

Medicare preventive services in 2026: the $0 checklist for Montrose County

Part B pays the full cost of the yearly "Wellness" visit and most screenings — no deductible, no coinsurance. But every one of those $0 figures has conditions attached, and the moment a screening turns into treatment, the price changes. Here's the whole list, the fine print, and how Montrose County is actually doing.

Bemis Insurance Data Desk

Reviewed by Trinity Bemis, Licensed Insurance Broker & Medicare Specialist (NPN 21424070) · Published 2026-08-10

The short answer

In 2026, Medicare Part B covers a yearly "Wellness" visit and roughly twenty screenings, vaccines, and counseling services at no cost to you — you pay nothing, and the $283 Part B deductible does not apply — as long as your provider accepts assignment. Medicare.gov states it plainly: "You pay nothing for most preventive services if you get the services from a health care provider who accepts assignment." The catch is that each service has its own eligibility rules and its own frequency limit, and several of them stop being $0 the moment the visit shifts from looking for a problem to treating one. This article is education, not advice. Every rule and figure below links to Medicare.gov or CMS.

Sources: Medicare.gov — Preventive & screening services · CMS — 2026 Medicare Parts A & B Premiums and Deductibles.

What is the yearly "Wellness" visit — and why isn't it a physical?

This is the most misunderstood appointment in Medicare, and the misunderstanding costs people money.

The yearly "Wellness" visit is a conversation-based visit to build or update a personalized prevention plan. Medicare.gov is unusually direct about what it isn't: "It isn't a routine physical exam." Your provider will ask you to fill out a Health Risk Assessment beforehand, and during the visit will:

• Take routine measurements — height, weight, blood pressure.
• Review your medical and family history, and your current prescriptions.
• Perform a cognitive assessment to look for signs of dementia, including Alzheimer's disease.
• Evaluate your risk factors for substance use disorder and refer you for treatment if needed. If you use opioid medication, review your pain treatment and share non-opioid options.
• Offer to talk with you about advance directives — the legal documents that record your wishes if you're ever unable to make decisions about your care.
• Offer an optional physical activity and nutrition risk assessment.
• Hand you a written plan — a checklist — of the screenings, vaccines, and other preventive services you're due for.
• Order other tests if your general health and medical history call for them.

Cost: $0 if your provider accepts assignment, and the Part B deductible doesn't apply. Frequency: once every 12 months.

Now the part that generates the surprise bills. Medicare.gov's own guidance says that if you have specific concerns about your health, schedule a separate appointment so the Wellness visit stays focused on prevention. That's not bureaucratic tidiness — it's a billing warning. If your provider performs additional tests or services during the same visit that Medicare doesn't cover under this preventive benefit, coinsurance may apply and the Part B deductible may apply to that portion. If Medicare doesn't cover the extra service at all — a routine physical exam, for example — you may owe the full amount.

The practical version: the Wellness visit is the appointment where you and your doctor build the plan. The knee that's been bothering you since March belongs in a different appointment.

Sources: Medicare.gov — Yearly “Wellness” visits · CMS — 2026 Medicare Parts A & B Premiums and Deductibles.

What is the "Welcome to Medicare" visit, and did I miss it?

The "Welcome to Medicare" preventive visit is a one-time check-up available once within your first 12 months of having Part B. It also costs $0 with an assignment-accepting provider, and the Part B deductible doesn't apply.

During it, your provider reviews your medical and social history, gives you information about preventive services including screenings and vaccines, reviews your risk factors for substance use disorder, calculates your BMI, gives you a simple vision test, reviews your risk for depression, offers to discuss advance directives, gives you referrals as needed, and hands you the same kind of written screening checklist. Medicare.gov suggests bringing your immunization records, your family health history, and a list of every prescription, over-the-counter drug, vitamin, and supplement you take, how often, and why.

If you missed the 12-month window, nothing is permanently lost. Medicare.gov is explicit: you don't need to have had a "Welcome to Medicare" preventive visit to qualify for a yearly "Wellness" visit. The only timing rule that binds is the other direction — your first yearly Wellness visit can't take place within 12 months of your Part B enrollment or of your Welcome visit.

If you're approaching 65 and reading this before you enroll, the sequencing is worth planning around. Our turning-65 Medicare roadmap walks through the seven-month enrollment window that determines when your Part B — and therefore this whole clock — actually starts.

Sources: Medicare.gov — “Welcome to Medicare” preventive visit · Medicare.gov — Yearly “Wellness” visits.

Every $0 preventive service in 2026, in one table

These are the published federal rules for Original Medicare in plan year 2026. Each "$0" assumes your provider accepts assignment — meaning they accept the Medicare-approved amount as payment in full. This is not a quote for any specific plan.

Sources: Medicare.gov — Preventive & screening services · Medicare.gov — Yearly “Wellness” visits · Medicare.gov — Colonoscopies (screening) · Medicare.gov — Mammograms · Medicare.gov — Lung cancer screenings · Medicare.gov — Bone mass measurements · Medicare.gov — Prostate cancer screenings · Medicare.gov — Obesity behavioral therapy · Medicare.gov — Shingles shots.

Sources: Medicare.gov — Yearly “Wellness” visits · CMS — 2026 Medicare Parts A & B Premiums and Deductibles · Medicare.gov — Colonoscopies (screening) · CDC PLACES: Local Data for Better Health, County Data.

Why people get a bill for a "free" screening

Preventive coverage in Medicare is generous and genuinely worth using. It is also full of edges. Four of them account for nearly every unexpected bill:

1. The visit turned into a problem visit. You mentioned the shoulder. Your provider examined it. That evaluation is a regular Part B service — 20% coinsurance after the $283 deductible — even though the Wellness visit itself remains $0.
2. The screening turned diagnostic. A screening mammogram is $0. A diagnostic mammogram — ordered to investigate an abnormality, a symptom, or a sign of breast cancer — is 20% of the Medicare-approved amount after the deductible. Same machine, same room, different billing code.
3. Something was found and removed. If your provider finds and removes a polyp or other tissue during a screening colonoscopy, you pay 15% of the Medicare-approved amount for the provider's services — and in a hospital outpatient department or ambulatory surgical center, another 15% to the facility. The Part B deductible still doesn't apply, which softens it, but it isn't zero.
4. The provider doesn't accept assignment. This is the quiet one. Every $0 on Medicare.gov's preventive pages is conditioned on it. On the PSA test, for instance, Medicare.gov notes that if you use a provider who doesn't accept assignment, you may pay an additional fee for the doctor's services even though the test itself stays covered.

Two more worth flagging because they surprise people specifically:

Advance care planning is $0 when it happens inside your Welcome or Wellness visit. Get it as part of other medical treatment and the Part B deductible and coinsurance apply. So if you want to talk through a health care proxy and a living will without a bill, do it at the Wellness visit — and say so when you book.

The cognitive assessment inside your Wellness visit is included at $0. But if your provider thinks you may have cognitive impairment, the separate, fuller visit that follows — reviewing cognitive function, confirming a diagnosis like dementia, building a care plan — is a standard Part B service at 20% after the $283 deductible. Worth knowing before the follow-up is scheduled, not after.

Sources: Medicare.gov — Mammograms · Medicare.gov — Colonoscopies (screening) · Medicare.gov — Prostate cancer screenings · Medicare.gov — Advance care planning · Medicare.gov — Cognitive assessment & care plan services.

How Montrose County is actually doing

The CDC's PLACES project publishes model-based prevalence estimates for every county in the country, built from Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System survey data. For Montrose County — total population 44,156, with 35,363 adults 18 and over — the prevention picture is uneven in a way that maps closely onto which services are easy to get and which take an appointment, a referral, and a drive.

The screenings that happen during an ordinary blood draw are widely used. 86.9% of Montrose County adults have had a cholesterol screening, and 73.3% had a routine checkup in the past year. Mammography use among women aged 50–74 sits at 71.6%.

Colorectal cancer screening is the outlier. Only 62.7% of Montrose County adults aged 45–75 are up to date — meaning roughly 37 out of every 100 are not, on a screening Medicare covers at $0 through at least three different tests, two of which require no procedure and no sedation at all.

Across the Western Slope, the pattern holds with only modest variation:

Source: CDC PLACES: Local Data for Better Health, County Data — colorectal cancer screening among adults aged 45–75, crude prevalence, 2022 release year, retrieved August 2026. PLACES figures are model-based small-area estimates, not direct counts.

Every county on that chart sits between roughly 61% and 70%. Nowhere on the Western Slope is close to universal — which means somewhere between three and four in ten eligible adults in each of these counties are carrying an unused, fully covered benefit.

There's a reason the stool-based and blood-based options matter especially here. A screening colonoscopy in Montrose or Grand Junction means a scheduled procedure, a prep day, and someone to drive you home — a real logistical lift from Nucla, Naturita, or Olathe. A fecal occult blood test is covered once every 12 months from age 45, and a blood-based biomarker test once every 3 years for average-risk adults aged 45–85. Both are $0. And if either comes back positive, Medicare covers the follow-up colonoscopy as a screening test — which is what keeps the follow-up at $0 rather than 20%.

Sources: CDC PLACES: Local Data for Better Health, County Data · Medicare.gov — Fecal occult blood tests (screening) · Medicare.gov — Blood-based biomarker tests for colorectal cancer screening · Medicare.gov — Colonoscopies (screening).

What about vaccines?

Vaccines split across two parts of Medicare, and knowing which is which prevents a pharmacy counter surprise.

Part B covers the flu vaccine (usually one each flu season — for the 2025–2026 season, people 65 and older can get a trivalent vaccine that protects against three flu viruses), pneumococcal vaccines, hepatitis B vaccines for people at risk, and COVID-19 vaccines. All at $0 when the provider accepts assignment for giving the vaccine. You can get a flu shot at your doctor's office or your local pharmacy.

Part D covers the rest — and this is the change many people still haven't heard about. Part D covers all adult vaccines recommended by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices that aren't covered under Part B, and your Part D plan can't charge a copayment or apply a deductible to them. That includes the shingles vaccine, RSV, whooping cough (Tdap), measles, and more. Shingles in particular used to cost people a few hundred dollars out of pocket; it doesn't anymore if you have Part D.

Which is one more reason a Part D plan is worth having even if you take few prescriptions today. We covered the other reason — the $2,100 annual cap on out-of-pocket Part D drug costs in 2026 — separately.

Sources: Medicare.gov — Flu shots · Medicare.gov — Pneumococcal shots · Medicare.gov — Shingles shots · Medicare.gov — Preventive & screening services.

Does a Medicare Advantage plan change any of this?

Medicare Advantage plans are required to cover everything Original Medicare Part A and Part B cover, and in practice plans generally apply no cost sharing to Medicare-covered preventive services when you use an in-network provider. Many go further and add benefits Original Medicare doesn't include at all.

The variable isn't the service. It's the network. That distinction carries real weight in a service area shaped like this one. If the in-network imaging center for your plan is in Grand Junction and the convenient one is in Montrose, the $0 you were counting on may not follow you. Prior authorization requirements, referral rules, and out-of-network cost sharing are set plan by plan and change year to year.

Two things to actually do:

• Read the preventive services lines in your plan's Evidence of Coverage — the document your plan mails each fall — rather than assuming parity with Original Medicare.
• Confirm the specific facility is in-network for your specific plan, not just that it "takes Medicare." Those are different questions and they get different answers.

If you're weighing the two structures generally, we've compared them for this side of the state in our Medigap vs Medicare Advantage guide for Montrose and Delta counties. And if you want to change plans, the window is the Annual Enrollment Period — October 15 through December 7.

Sources: Medicare.gov — Health & drug plans · Medicare.gov — Preventive & screening services.

How to actually use the benefit this year

A short order of operations. None of this requires an insurance agent — it requires a phone call and a calendar.

1. Book the yearly "Wellness" visit by name. When you call, say those words: "I'd like to schedule my Medicare yearly Wellness visit." Not "a checkup," not "my annual physical." The words determine the billing code.
2. Ask: "Does the provider accept assignment?" Ask it about the doctor and about the facility. This single question protects every $0 on this page.
3. Book health complaints separately. If something's been bothering you, that's its own appointment. Keep the Wellness visit clean.
4. Fill out the Health Risk Assessment before you go. It's what the visit is built around, and doing it at the kitchen table produces better answers than doing it in a waiting room.
5. Bring the list. Every prescription, over-the-counter drug, vitamin, and supplement — how much, how often, and why. Plus your immunization records and family health history.
6. Ask for advance care planning during the visit. It's $0 there and billable elsewhere.
7. Leave with the written checklist of screenings and vaccines you're due for — and then actually schedule the ones on it. That checklist is the entire point of the appointment.
8. Check your Medicare account. You can log in at Medicare.gov to see which preventive services you've used and when you're next eligible — which settles most "am I due?" questions in about ninety seconds.
9. If cost is the barrier, check the programs that help. Our guides to Medicare Savings Programs and Extra Help for Part D cover the income and resource limits — the $202.90 monthly Part B premium is what QMB, SLMB, and QI can pay.

Sources: Medicare.gov — Yearly “Wellness” visits · Medicare.gov — “Welcome to Medicare” preventive visit · Medicare.gov — Preventive & screening services.

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, 1-800-MEDICARE, or your local State Health Insurance Assistance Program (SHIP) to get information on all of your options. Bemis Insurance is a licensed independent insurance agency. Not connected with or endorsed by the United States government or the federal Medicare program. This article is education, not advice — it is not medical advice, and which screenings are appropriate for you is a decision for you and your doctor. Confirm your eligibility, coverage, and costs with a licensed agent or Medicare.gov. Figures above are published federal rules and amounts for plan year 2026 and CDC PLACES county estimates (2022 and 2023 release years, model-based prevalence); each is linked to its source. Cost sharing shown assumes Original Medicare and a provider who accepts assignment; Medicare Advantage cost sharing, networks, prior authorization, and referral rules are defined by the individual plan.

Sources

• Medicare.gov — Preventive & screening services
• Medicare.gov — Yearly “Wellness” visits
• Medicare.gov — “Welcome to Medicare” preventive visit
• CMS — 2026 Medicare Parts A & B Premiums and Deductibles
• Medicare.gov — Colonoscopies (screening)
• Medicare.gov — Fecal occult blood tests (screening)
• Medicare.gov — Blood-based biomarker tests for colorectal cancer screening
• Medicare.gov — Mammograms
• Medicare.gov — Lung cancer screenings
• Medicare.gov — Cardiovascular disease screenings
• Medicare.gov — Diabetes screenings
• Medicare.gov — Bone mass measurements
• Medicare.gov — Prostate cancer screenings
• Medicare.gov — Depression screening
• Medicare.gov — Alcohol misuse screenings and counseling
• Medicare.gov — Obesity behavioral therapy
• Medicare.gov — Flu shots
• Medicare.gov — Pneumococcal shots
• Medicare.gov — Shingles shots
• Medicare.gov — Advance care planning
• Medicare.gov — Cognitive assessment & care plan services
• Medicare.gov — Health & drug plans
• Medicare.gov — Your Guide to Medicare Preventive Services (PDF)
• CDC PLACES: Local Data for Better Health, County Data