The Free Medicare Counselor Runs on $70 Million. The Commissioned Broker Channel Runs on $6.9 Billion.

Every Medicare beneficiary has two ways to get help choosing a plan.▸ One is the State Health Insurance Assistance Program, a federally funded, state-run network of counselors bound by law to give unbiased advice, no products sold. The other is a licensed insurance agent or broker, paid a commission by the Medicare Advantage plan whose product they enroll the beneficiary into. Both channels exist to answer the same question — which plan is actually right for this person — and they run on almost incomparable budgets.

SHIP operates on $70 million a year in federal funding: $55 million in discretionary appropriations plus $15 million in mandatory funding under the Medicare Improvements for Patients and Providers Act (MIPPA), according to KFF's 2026 analysis of grant data from the Administration for Community Living (ACL), which runs the program.▸ That funds 12,500 team members working out of 2,200 local sites across all 50 states, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the District of Columbia — nearly half of them volunteers, per KFF.

The commission-driven channel is a different order of magnitude.▸ A U.S. Senate Finance Committee investigation led by Ranking Member Ron Wyden, released in March 2025 and built on insurers' own filings with the National Association of Insurance Commissioners, found that Medicare Advantage insurers' spending on "agents and brokers fees and commissions" rose from $2.4 billion in 2018 to $6.9 billion in 2023 — a 19% compound annual growth rate, nearly triple the pace at which insurers grew their own in-house sales staffing over the same years.

Laid side by side, the two budgets that inform the same enrollment decision are separated by a factor of roughly 100.

SHIP reached 4.3 million Medicare beneficiaries, family members, and caregivers in 2022, 1.7 million of them through direct one-on-one counseling — on a budget KFF calculates works out to roughly $1 per Medicare beneficiary per year, essentially flat since 2015.▸ The commission channel serves a plan-enrollment market that grew alongside it: Medicare Advantage enrollment rose from 21.3 million to 32.2 million people over the same 2018–2023 window the Senate Finance Committee tracked, a 7% average annual increase, per the same report.

The Finance Committee's investigation compared insurers' broker payments against their own direct sales costs — the salaries and benefits of company-employed sales staff — to show the shift toward outsourced, commission-paid enrollment.

The report's investigators flagged that this money moves through a layer of third-party marketing organizations and lead generators that state and federal regulators have limited visibility into — a structure CMS moved to rein in with a rule, effective October 2024, that eliminated insurers' use of uncapped "administrative fee" payments to brokers on top of standard commissions.

The two channels don't just differ in budget — they differ in what a beneficiary gets.▸ KFF's analysis of ACL data found that the average SHIP one-on-one counseling contact runs more than three times as long as the average call to 1-800-MEDICARE, the federal government's own hotline.

That 33-minute average is up nearly 20% since 2014, as plan choices have grown more complex — the opposite direction from SHIP's budget, which KFF found has barely moved in a decade.

SHIP's funding was not a given for 2026.▸ A leaked "pre-decisional" HHS budget draft for fiscal year 2026 proposed eliminating essentially all of SHIP's discretionary funding — about 80% of the program's total budget — as part of a broader plan to dissolve the Administration for Community Living. Congress did not adopt that proposal: as the Center for Medicare Advocacy documented in January 2026, lawmakers funded SHIP for the full fiscal year instead. The commission channel, meanwhile, needed no congressional action to keep growing.

This piece compares two funding streams for Medicare enrollment guidance — federal SHIP appropriations and MA insurers' agent/broker spending — that run through entirely separate budgets; the figures illustrate scale, not a single shared pool of money.