The Original Medicare leg
The Original Medicare year is built in three pieces: premiums, deductibles and 20% coinsurance. The premium line is the $202.90 Part B amount plus whatever you pay monthly for Medigap and Part D, multiplied by twelve - with no supplement and no drug plan it comes to $2,434.80. The deductible line is $283 for Part B once a year plus $1,736 for every hospital stay you enter, and the stay count is rounded down to whole stays and capped at twelve. Coinsurance is 20% of approved Part B services above the $283, so $5,000 of care adds $943.40. Nothing on this side has a ceiling.
One limitation is worth naming plainly: a Medigap premium is counted as a cost, but the page does not model the coverage that premium buys. The 20% line still applies in full, so a Medigap policy adds to the Original total here rather than shielding it. Type a high Medigap premium and the Original path looks worse than it would in practice, which is a reason to read the comparison with the supplement’s benefit in mind.
The Advantage leg
The Advantage year is priced from the plan’s own paperwork, and it keeps the Part B premium because everyone on Medicare pays it whichever route they take. Its premium is the $202.90 plus the plan premium, times twelve. On top of that sits in-network cost sharing: the plan’s annual deductible plus your coinsurance share of the full amount of services you enter.
That ordering matters. The deductible is added to the share of all services rather than carved out of them first, so a 50% share on $20,000 of care is $10,000, and the $2,500 deductible makes $12,500 before any cap is applied. The out-of-pocket maximum then becomes a ceiling: once cost sharing reaches it, the plan stops charging. Entering zero for the maximum means no cap is modelled at all, which is not the same as a $0 cap. The share itself is held between 0% and 100%.
The sweep, and where it crosses
Because the answer depends on how much care the year holds, the page re-prices both routes at seven fixed levels: $0, $3,000, $6,000, $12,000, $24,000, $36,000 and $48,000 of services, printing both totals and the gap between them. Original Medicare rises steadily, because 20% of every extra dollar is yours. Advantage climbs to its cap and then flattens, which is usually where the two lines cross.
The break-even search starts at $500 of services and steps upward to $200,000. It reports zero when the Advantage route is already cheaper at no care at all, and reports nothing when it never gets there. Read that crossing as a description of the starting line rather than the headline: the saving the page prints always comes from the year you typed. An exact tie goes to Original Medicare with $0.00 of savings, because the comparison uses a strict less-than test.
What the page cannot see
Four things that decide a real choice are missing from the arithmetic. Provider networks come first: an Advantage plan pays in-network only, so care outside it is not priced here at all. Then prior authorization and drug formularies, which shape whether care happens as much as what it costs. Finally income-related Part B premiums - IRMAA - which raise the $202.90 for higher earners and are not an input; there is no federal poverty level field on this page either.
The shared Part B premium is deliberately counted on both sides, so the difference you see comes from the plan premium, the deductible and the cost-sharing structure rather than from charging a common cost to one route only. Figures are the 2026 CMS amounts, verified against the official text and kept on record; everything on the Advantage side is whatever your plan’s Summary of Benefits and Evidence of Coverage say.
Danfio