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Cutting medical red tape SHIBA volunteers help Rogue Valley residents negotiate the labyrinths of the senior health-care system By John Darling Negotiating the maze of Medicare paperwork to decipher and pay their medical bills is enough to send many seniors into a near state of panic. But before you hit that panic button, reach for the phone: There's a staff of trained volunteers eager and ready to help. Part of a program called SHIBA (Senior Health Insurance Benefits Assistance), these volunteers will walk you through Medicare's regulations and billing cycles, make phone calls to troubleshoot problems and tell you where to send your checks. "If you ever saw these Medicare forms and tried to reconcile them with your doctor bills and paperwork from your supplemental insurer, you'd know why people are confused," said Becky Snyder, director of the Retired Senior Volunteer Program, the umbrella organization of SHIBA. Seniors come from a generation who paid their bills fully and early, she said, but this ethic is frustrated by a Medicare system in which bills flow back and forth for months among doctors, Medicare, Medicaid and supplemental insurers, known as Medi-gap. These pay hospital and doctor deductibles and try to fill the gap left by Medicare covering only 80 percent of costs. It's up to patients to wait out the process, reconcile all these bills, determine if the services were performed and the charges are correct, then find out the amount left for them to pay. "If a senior is physically ill and her body is in decline and the energy is lacking and perhaps she's developing dementia, she isn't going to deal with this very well," said SHIBA volunteer Loretta Nordquist. One distraught patient, a retired professor, brought Nordquist stacks of bills for a minor surgery, all with thousands of dollars of billing on them, she said. He'd given up on understanding it all, but when Nordquist was done, he owed only $66. He sent her flowers. Another patient, an elderly woman recovering from a car wreck, was in "near panic" as she presented stacks of bills to SHIBA. "We spent 84 hours with her, calling doctors to verify services and costs and ended up saving her thousands of dollars," Nordquist said. Another patient was desperate in the face of medical bills and living in poverty in a rooming house after his home burned down, destroying all his records.SHIBA guided him to a program under which, because of his extreme circumstances, all medical bills were forgiven, she said. SHIBA's nine volunteers locally have taken a grueling five-day training given by the State Insurance Division, plus bimonthly refresher courses on new regulations. "Often, clients will say we've given them more help than anyone," Nordquist said. "They called Medicare and their Medi-gap insurer and learned parts of the puzzle, but none of them knew how it all meshed together. At SHIBA, we're trained to work with the broad view of it." SHIBA volunteers work on nearly 300 cases a year in their Barnett Street office, at senior centers or in the client's home. And they handle inquiries by phone, including many from adult children trying to help a parent's case from out of the area. "By the time they find us, a lot of people are at the end of their rope," said Snyder. "But once they know they have someone to talk to, life gets a lot easier." How to contact SHIBA Frustrated by Medicare and other insurance bills? Senior Health Insurance Benefits Assistance can help. SHIBA volunteers will help you sort through your medical bills, troubleshoot problems and tell you where to send your checks. They can be reached by calling 779-5257. Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.