'Partners in D' Out in Full Force During Medicare Open-Enrollment Period
By Justine Ung
Editor-at-Large
Every fall quarter, Partners in D, a statewide initiative among seven schools of pharmacy that is spearheaded by faculty members at the UCSF School of Pharmacy and funded by the Amgen Foundation, offers an elective class to students interested in helping underserved seniors with their Medicare Part D plans. These seniors have low and very low incomes and often have limited English language skills. After 13 hours of intensive training during a four-week period this fall, more than 30 student pharmacists became Medicare Part D specialists, serving as senior advocates in the greater San Francisco areas.
Most of the outreach events take place in senior housing complexes and clinics. In only one short week after the beginning of the Medicare Part D open-enrollment period (November 15th to December 31st), the UCSF Partners in D team has gone to five different underserved communities, helping more than 100 seniors from various backgrounds find and enroll in the most economical Medicare Part D plans for 2009.
As one of the two student coordinators for the Partners in D outreach program, I attended four out of the five outreaches this past week. Despite my extremely busy second-year-pharmacy-school schedule, the experiences and rewards that I have reaped from the Medicare Part D elective and outreaches are invaluable.
For one thing, I have acquired a tremendous amount of information about Medicare Part D from two of the most enthusiastic authorities in this subject, UCSF faculty members and pharmacists Dr. Marilyn Stebbins and Dr. Tim Cutler. Having attended the training sessions for the second time (I took the elective class last year), I now feel a lot more confident in being a patient advocate for Medicare Part D, something that I will be heavily involved in as a student-intern at my sister’s independently owned pharmacy. I now have winter job security because she has hired me as the “expert” to help patients with their Medicare Part D plans.
More importantly, I have rediscovered the joy of public service, a strong and intrinsically rewarding feeling that I have not experienced at this magnitude in a long while. No matter how tired I am after each event or how I wish there were more hours in a day for me to squeeze in some studying, I am still happy to be involved. Every single senior who I helped showed a tremendous amount of appreciation for my knowledge and time as I provided them them with the information and assistance that they otherwise could not have gotten elsewhere.
With the guidance of my energetic faculty preceptors, Marilyn and Tim, I am helping seniors save thousands of prescription drug dollars for 2009 by enrolling them in the most cost effective plans, which cover their current medications. This week, Partners in D saved one person more than $19,000!
Who knows what underserved seniors would do if Partners in D were not acting on their behalves? They might be stuck on unsuitably expensive plans, skipping doses, not filling their prescriptions or buying their medicines from foreign countries to save money. They might go broke paying for their medicines in order to stay healthy or end up critically ill in the hospital due to cost-related non-adherence.
The more outreach events that I attend, the more I value the foresight of the UCSF leaders who created Partners in D. However, a disturbing truth lingers in my mind: Although Partners in D is a statewide project with seven pharmacy schools in California helping seniors with their Medicare Part D plans, we are only reaching a small percentage of the underserved elderly population in California, not to mention nationally.
Despite the availability of a Medicare Part D website (www.medicare.gov) as an unbiased source for plan comparisons, only about two percent of the senior population utilizes it. Most are not even aware of its existence. The plan finder tool within this site is so difficult that I, along with most of my Medicare Part D classmates, could not even navigate through it without the proper training. I cannot imagine how the pre-Internet generation can figure out the way to use it without assistance.
Throughout our interventions this week, we have come across seniors enrolled in unnecessary and expensive health plans through sales representatives who offer them free gym memberships or rides to their providers. As a result, they can no longer see their regular physicians and have to pay more for the health care. Unfortunately, for some of those seniors, the consequences of their “choices” are not reversible until the beginning of 2009.
As a product of the Asian culture and philosophy, where the elderly are well respected and supported, I have a very difficult time seeing the jewels of our wisdom and the bridges to our future extremely helpless in a matter so vital during their retirement years. Until the government finds more practical and available solutions to support seniors in their Medicare Part D decisions, healthcare providers are the best and most accessible resources for this long adjustment period.
To become a Medicare Part D patient advocate, student pharmacists can enroll in Partners in D’s annual fall elective class offered through the School of Pharmacy. For more information about Partners in D and Medicare Part D, you can use the following web resources:
http://partnersind.com/
www.medicare.gov
Justine Ung is a second-year pharmacy student.