By Jennifer Nitson
Gazette-Times reporter | Posted: Wednesday, August 22, 2007 12:00 am
"Somebody said something about a manicure bus," said a disappointed woman at the Corvallis Senior Center on Tuesday afternoon.
She was not impressed with the Medicare tour bus that rolled into town for the Senior Center's health fair to spread the word about Medicare's preventive health benefits.
Even without the lure of manicures, dozens of seniors poured out of the building when the bus pulled up on 26th Street. They were joined by dozens more back inside for a presentation by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services regional administrator John Hammarlund.
"I'm here to spread a message," Hammarlund said. "It's the human cost of chronic disease. Prevention and preventative screening can do very much to stave off the risk of chronic disease."
Hammarlund pointed to a large brochure featuring a checklist of health screenings and preventative procedures covered by Medicare - flu and pneumonia immunizations, cardiovascular screenings, cancer screenings, diabetes screenings, bone-mass analysis to measure risk of osteoporosis and more.
"All of this is available through Medicare, and you may not know it," Hammarlund said.
The goal of the Medicare tour is to arm seniors with the information they need to use Medicare preventative health benefits, so that seniors and their doctors can to detect chronic diseases early in their course when they are more treatable.
In addition to a better quality of life for the nation's seniors, preventing disease or treating disease at early stages reduces the cost of treating chronic disease.
Hundreds of billions of dollars in medical costs is spent in the United States each year in the treatment of just two common chronic ailments - heart disease and diabetes.
"If the current trend continues, one in every three dollars of our gross domestic product will be spent in health care costs," said Medicare spokesman Michael Marchand. "That's scary."
"For every dollar invested in diabetes self management, nine dollars are saved in treatment costs," he pointed out.
In addition to spreading the word about preventative benefits, the Medicare representatives on the tour are fielding all manner of questions about Medicare and Medicaid as the bus makes its way across the continental U.S.
Ijourie Fisher traveled from Kings Valley on Tuesday to meet up with the bus full of Medicare representatives because she was tired of listening to recorded messages when she tries to call the agency with questions.
"It's so difficult to get Medicare on the phone," Fisher said. "We tried for days and days, so we thought maybe we could get some answers to the questions by coming to the fair here."
In the process of switching from an HMO to Medicare, Fisher wants to know about enrollment deadlines, how and when to sign up for Medicare's notoriously complicated Part D for prescription drug benefits and when she will get her Medicare card.
Within minutes after the bus pulled up, Fisher's daughter April said she had found out the answer to one key question.
The trick to getting through to a real, live person when you call Medicare, she told her mom, is to repeatedly choose "agent" when prompted by the recorded message.
Content with that information, mother and daughter went home.