Medicare Rights Center, Inc.

The Medicare Rights Center works to ensure access to affordable health care for older adults and people with disabilities through counseling and advocacy, educational programs, and public policy initiatives. Each year, Medicare Rights reaches millions of Medicare beneficiaries, their families, caregivers, and the professionals who serve them with counseling and educational resources to help them navigate health insurance and access affordable, quality health care.

Medicare Rights is currently working to achieve the following overarching objectives, in line with its three-year strategic plan:

• Serve in a more in-depth fashion a greater number of caregivers, individuals dually eligible for Medicare and Medicaid, and hard-to-reach individuals through new funding opportunities, concerted outreach, more interactive staff and volunteer trainings, and improved tracking and referral protocols.

• Offer consumer counseling through an email channel in addition to the telephone helpline (considering fee-based options where appropriate); capture non-anonymous client stories; and successfully survey a subset of 10% of all consumer and professional clients to ensure quality and improve counseling and education services.

• Serve a greater number of people with Medicare through expanded Part A Buy-in counseling (which helps extremely low-income clients secure needed benefits), training, and benefits processing; hold regular, goal-oriented, enrollment-related meetings with New York City agencies; and, absent policy change, successfully process at least 1,000 Medicare Savings Program (MSP) applications per year.

• Strengthen the competitiveness of Medicare Interactive (MI), MI Pro, and the State Health Insurance Assistance Program (SHIP) Online Counselor Certification & Training platform (MI Pro for SHIPs) through content and design improvements.

• Shape new and existing Medicare and Medicaid programs while spotlighting the critical need for these programs and continuing to protect them and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) from threats.

• Understand and redesign/re-launch as needed Medicare Rights’ various Communications resources in order to continue efforts to present a more cohesive brand strategy, increase organizational visibility, and improve the organization’s ability to convert individuals into subscribers, purchasers, and donors.

Medicare Rights will achieve its overarching objectives by engaging in a variety of activities that include:

• Strengthening its staff and volunteer base and ensuring that its lawyers, social workers, and others are fully versed on all changes to Medicare and ready to answer all helpline and other technical assistance questions.

• Streamlining Medicare Rights' protocol for screening all helpline callers for Medicare-related cost-saving benefits.

• Promoting Medicare Rights' service and educational products by developing and maintaining strategic partnerships with state- and community-based organizations, health care professionals, and other relevant entities (e.g., financial advisors, human resources departments, academic institutions).

• Increasing organizational visibility and impact by launching new products, attending and presenting at relevant trainings and conferences, implementing targeted list-building campaigns, increasing the organization's donor base, and educating journalists and policymakers about new Medicare proposals and policies and their effects on people with Medicare and their families.

• Responding to any federal changes to the health care system by counseling and educating consumers and professionals on new policies and advocating for proposals that reflect the needs of older adults and people with disabilities (in coalition with state and national organizations).

The Medicare Rights Center is the nation's preeminent source of Medicare information. Over the past 30 years, Medicare Rights has gained extensive on-the-ground experience developing direct service and training models and helping millions of people with Medicare, their families, and the professionals serving them navigate the complicated and often frustrating health insurance system. Medicare Rights is unique in its ability to take the stories of the people it serves to the highest levels of policymaking, seeking long-term reforms to benefit people with Medicare and their families.

In New York, Medicare Rights successfully reaches low-income individuals with reliable information about health care and cost-saving benefits through partnerships, outreach events, and helpline assistance. Medicare Rights has a strong track record of creating successful, sustainable partnerships with organizations working toward shared goals and excels at building the capacity of other senior-serving organizations to better serve their own clients. Additionally, Medicare Rights' enrollment work helps low-income beneficiaries nationwide enroll in cost-saving benefits that can save them thousands of dollars per year in out-of-pocket drug costs.

Medicare Rights also focuses on expanding the organization's reach to serve an increased number of professionals. Through community partnerships and relationships with a network of social workers, doctors, nurses, and others, Medicare Rights provides the health care community with relevant, timely Medicare information. As part of this effort, Medicare Rights launched the online resource MI Pro, which empowers professionals with Medicare information while earning unrestricted income for the organization.

Finally, as state and federal changes to the health care system are proposed, Medicare Rights works with diverse media outlets and others to serve as a voice for millions of Americans with Medicare and their families. Last year, Medicare Rights generated around 2,933 media placements in outlets such as The New York Times, the Washington Post, Kaiser Health News, NPR, and the Chicago Tribune. In sum, Medicare Rights seeks to educate and activate diverse consumers, service providers, advocates, journalists, and others on potential changes to Medicare and new systems, and to comment on and wherever possible inform policies that reflect the needs of older adults and people with disabilities.

The Medicare Rights Center is most effective at directly serving people with Medicare and leveraging their stories to improve the Medicare program as a whole. Medicare Rights reaches millions of people with Medicare each year—and aims to reach more. For instance, the organization's Medicare Interactive website received over three million visits last year, and staff are adding features to the website to make it more user-friendly and engaging. Additionally, Medicare Rights has strong partnerships with other consumer advocates, insurers, providers, and policymakers—and seeks to leverage these relationships and build new ones, for instance with new media and educational partners.

In recent years, Medicare Rights, in coalition with other state and national organizations, has achieved significant policy victories for people with Medicare, such as securing a permanent extension of time-limited equitable relief for certain individuals who require extra time transitioning from Marketplace coverage to Medicare, and permanently repealing the Medicare payment caps on outpatient physical, speech, and occupational therapy services in the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018.

In the coming years, Medicare Rights will respond to new health care system policies and proposals emerging from state and federal agencies—and to questions that clients and partners will inevitably have as the national insurance landscape changes. Medicare Rights is building and adapting its existing educational and advocacy materials to protect and strengthen the Medicare program for this and future generations, and collecting more stories of the people served by Medicare Rights to make the case for consumer-friendly reforms.

Finally, Medicare Rights already receives significant contract and foundation support and is continuing to build its earned income (through educational products like MI Pro) and individual contributions, seeking more unrestricted income to carry out mission-driven projects. Medicare Rights is developing materials and adding new features to Medicare Interactive—e.g., improved MI Pro course catalogues, new Special Topics courses, and downloadable guides and resources—to make it more user-friendly and to expand the scope of MI's educational resources and products. Medicare Rights is also redesigning its organizational website in order to present a more cohesive story to potential subscribers, purchasers, and donors.