The short answer
Every state has a State Health Insurance Assistance Program, or SHIP, giving free one-on-one Medicare counseling. Medicare's own page says SHIPs are not connected to any insurance company or health plan. Some states run the service under a different name entirely.
There is someone in your state whose job is to answer your Medicare questions, for nothing, with no plan to sell you. In some states it is filed under a name you have never heard.
What is SHIP (State Health Insurance Assistance Program)?
SHIP is a national program offering one-on-one assistance, counseling and education to people with Medicare, their families and their caregivers, to help them make informed decisions about their care and benefits. It runs in every state, and it has done since 1990.
It is not new and it is not small. SHIPs were created under the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990, which let the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services make grants to states for health insurance advisory services.
In 2014 the program moved from CMS to the Administration for Community Living, the federal agency that runs it today.
There are 54 grantees, one in each of the 50 states plus Puerto Rico, Guam, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands, overseeing more than 2,200 local sites.
How do I find free Medicare counseling near me?
Medicare.gov has a route to it, and it is easy to walk past. On the page where you contact Medicare, under the heading Get free health insurance counseling, there is a button reading Get personalized help. It goes to shiphelp.org.
The Administration for Community Living gives the same address, plus a phone number, 877-839-2675, for reaching a SHIP in your community.
That is one national front door for 54 separate state programs, which is the whole reason it exists.
The thing behind it is local. More than 2,200 sites, staffed by over 12,500 people, including paid staff, professionals working in kind, and volunteers.
What can a SHIP counselor help with?
Medicare's own page sets out what SHIPs do, in six items. They help you choose a plan, review coverage, understand costs, apply for Extra Help, file a complaint or an appeal, and make informed Medicare decisions. Every one of those is a whole subject on its own.
A second list on Medicare.gov goes further, and it is the more interesting one. SHIP staff and trained volunteers also help with your Medicare rights, billing problems, complaints about your medical care or treatment, comparing and joining plans, how Medicare works with other insurance, and finding help paying for health care costs.
Notice what is in there. Complaints about your medical care. Billing problems. How Medicare fits with the insurance you already have.
These are the questions with no obvious owner, the ones that fall between your plan, your doctor's office and Medicare itself. This publication covers appeals, enrollment and the programs that lower costs on their own pages, and a counselor is the person who can look at all of it at once.
Is SHIP really free and unbiased?
Yes on both counts, and the second one has a source worth naming. Medicare's own website states that SHIPs are not connected to any insurance companies or health plans. That is Medicare saying it about a service, not a service saying it about itself.
The program's stated mission uses the same word. It is to empower, educate and assist Medicare-eligible individuals through objective outreach, counseling and training.
The scale says something too. In 2020, the most recent year the Administration for Community Living publishes, SHIPs gave one-on-one counseling to more than 1.8 million people with Medicare, their families and their caregivers, including 209,859 adults under 65 with disabilities.
They also hosted 18,800 outreach events that year, more than 4,000 of them enrollment events.
Do SHIP counselors sell insurance?
No. The sentence that answers this is the same one that answered the last question, because it does two jobs at once: SHIPs are not connected to any insurance companies or health plans. Not connected covers selling, and it covers being paid by whoever sells.
Read that as a statement about ownership rather than about manners. A counselor who is not connected to a plan has nothing to gain from which plan you pick.
That is different from an agent, who may be entirely honest and is still paid by somebody when you enroll. The structure, not the person, is what changed.
Where the program sits explains why. Its funding is a federal grant to a state agency, and its delivery runs through state offices on aging or state insurance departments and their local partners.
How do I contact my state SHIP?
Here is the part that keeps people from finding this at all. The program has your state's name on it. The Administration for Community Living says SHIP services are delivered by state units on aging or by state departments of insurance, which is two different kinds of agency holding one program.
Reading that alongside what the states themselves publish is our analysis rather than a rule anyone states: two kinds of landlord, and the name follows the landlord.
Three states, each from its own government's website:
| State | What it is called there | Which agency runs it |
|---|---|---|
| Massachusetts | SHINE | The state aging office |
| California | HICAP | The Department of Aging |
| Washington | SHIBA | The Insurance Commissioner |
Massachusetts calls it SHINE, for Serving the Health Insurance Needs of Everyone, and you reach a counselor through MassOptions on 1-800-243-4636. California calls it HICAP, the Health Insurance Counseling and Advocacy Program. Washington calls it SHIBA, Statewide Health Insurance Benefits Advisors, on 800-562-6900, weekdays from 8:30 in the morning to 4:30 in the afternoon.
Three states were read here and 51 grantees were not, so nothing is claimed about how common this is. What the three show is that searching the national name may not find your own state at all.
What this means for you
SHIP is a national program that gives free one-on-one Medicare counseling, and it has existed since 1990. The Administration for Community Living has run it since 2014, through 54 grantees, one per state and territory, and more than 2,200 local sites.
It covers the questions that fall between everyone else: your rights, billing problems, complaints about your care, and how Medicare fits with insurance you already have.
Medicare's own page says SHIPs are not connected to any insurance company or health plan. That is about who pays them, which is why it holds regardless of who you get on the phone.
Your state's version may not be called SHIP. It is SHINE in Massachusetts, HICAP in California and SHIBA in Washington, because some states run it through an aging office and some through the insurance department.
The national locator medicare.gov points at is shiphelp.org, and the Administration for Community Living gives 877-839-2675 for the same purpose. For calling Medicare itself, including its hours and its interpreter, read this publication's article on the Medicare phone number.
FAQ
Is SHIP part of Medicare?
Not exactly, and the distinction is worth having. SHIP is a federal program, but it is not run by Medicare.
It was created under the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990, which authorized the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to make grants to states for health insurance advisory services, and in 2014 it was transferred from CMS to the Administration for Community Living.
Today ACL runs it, through 54 grantees, one in each of the 50 states plus Puerto Rico, Guam, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Virgin Islands. So the money is federal, the counselor is your state's, and Medicare's role is to point you at them, which its own website does.
Why can I not find a SHIP office in my state?
Because it may not be called SHIP where you live. The Administration for Community Living states that SHIP services are delivered by state units on aging or by state departments of insurance, and the name tends to follow whichever agency holds it. Massachusetts calls it SHINE, Serving the Health Insurance Needs of Everyone.
California calls it HICAP, the Health Insurance Counseling and Advocacy Program. Washington calls it SHIBA, Statewide Health Insurance Benefits Advisors, and runs it out of the Insurance Commissioner's office rather than an aging agency. Those three were checked against their own state governments' websites. Nothing is claimed about the other 51 grantees, because they were not checked.
How much does SHIP counseling cost?
Nothing. Medicare's own website describes it as free personalized health insurance counseling, and the state pages that were read say the same about their own versions.
The funding is a federal grant to a state agency, delivered through state units on aging or state departments of insurance and their local partners, and that is what pays for it instead of you. It is worth separating the cost question from the independence question, because they have different answers with different sources.
Free means you are not billed, and it comes from the description of the service. Independent comes from a different sentence on Medicare's site: SHIPs are not connected to any insurance companies or health plans. One is about your wallet and the other is about theirs.
Will a SHIP counselor tell me which plan to buy?
What Medicare's page says a SHIP does is help you choose a plan, review coverage, understand costs, apply for Extra Help, file a complaint or an appeal, and make informed Medicare decisions.
The program's own mission statement uses the word objective. Beyond that, what any individual counselor says in a session is not something the government publishes a rule about, and this publication does not guess at it.
What is documented, and what actually matters, is the structural fact underneath: the counselor is not connected to any insurance company or health plan, so nothing about your choice changes what they are paid.
Are SHIP counselors volunteers or employees?
Both, and the program describes the mix. Nationally SHIP oversees more than 2,200 local sites and over 12,500 team members, and the Administration for Community Living counts those as staff, in-kind professionals, and volunteers.
In-kind means a professional whose time is contributed rather than paid for by the program. The Massachusetts page describes its own SHINE counselors as certified and trained, and often volunteers. Washington describes its SHIBA advisors as volunteers, working out of the state Insurance Commissioner's office.
So the person you speak to may be a paid employee and may not be, and in either case they are trained and certified by the program rather than by a plan.
The independence claim does not rest on which of the three they are, because it is a statement about what the program is connected to, not about who is on the payroll.
How many people actually use it?
More than you would guess from how rarely it comes up. In 2020, which is the most recent year the Administration for Community Living publishes a figure for, SHIPs gave one-on-one health insurance counseling to more than 1.8 million Medicare beneficiaries, their families and their caregivers.
That number included 209,859 adults under 65 who have Medicare through a disability. The same year, SHIPs hosted 18,800 outreach events, more than 4,000 of which were enrollment events.
Read the year as part of the figure rather than as a footnote to it: 2020 is the latest ACL publishes, not a current-year count, and this publication does not carry a number without the year it belongs to. For scale, that counseling was delivered through more than 2,200 local sites and over 12,500 team members.
