Guest blog by Emily Balkan, Policy and Client Services Associate at the Medicare Rights Center. Do you or a loved one have Medicare and Medicaid and long-term care needs? If so, you may have recently experienced a change to the way you receive your coverage. If the way you receive Medicare and Medicaid, including long-term care or personal care services, has recently changed, the Medicare Rights Center’s Coalition to Protect the Rights of New York’s Dually Eligible (CPRNYDE) needs to hear your story.

You may have heard about or are currently enrolled in New York’s Managed Long Term Care (MLTC) plans. New Yorkers with Medicare and Medicaid who have long-term care needs may qualify for an MLTC plan if they are over age 18, have both Medicare and Medicaid, and receive 4 months or more (120+ days) of long-term care services, including personal care at home, or nursing care in a nursing facility. Individuals who qualify for MLTC and live in New York City (the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan or Staten Island), Long Island, or Westchester County may also qualify for a Fully Integrated Duals Advantage (FIDA) plan. The FIDA program gives you the option of enrolling in a plan that provides both your Medicare and your Medicaid benefits, including your Medicare Part D prescriptions and your Medicaid long-term care services.

If you would like to share your experience, good or bad, with this new coverage, we want to hear from you! CPRNYDE is a diverse group of professional advocates working to shape New York’s Managed Long-Term Care (MLTC) and Fully Integrated Duals Advantage (FIDA) programs to provide quality care for the state’s unique population of individuals enrolled in both Medicare and Medicaid. As a part of our advocacy work, we formed a group of consumers and caregivers who, together with CPRNYDE professionals, are working together to ensure that your voice is heard by policymakers. Additionally, CPRNYDE releases monthly blog posts, such as this one, and we are exploring other ways to engage with consumers through social media.

We are currently recruiting consumers and caregivers throughout New York State to join our group. Each member has the opportunity to speak directly to a CPRNYDE professional to discuss their experiences with their health care coverage. In addition to these one-on-one calls, members are encouraged to participate in monthly group calls with other consumers and caregivers. During these calls, consumers and caregivers discuss their satisfactions and dissatisfactions with their coverage, and together the group makes plans to improve health care coverage in New York State.

For example, one new project the group is working on is providing comments and feedback to the State Department of Health about whether letters from the State Medicaid Office are easy to understand. As a group, we are suggesting changes to the State to help them make the notices easier to understand for all New Yorkers.

Does this project seem interesting to you? Do you want to improve health care for yourself, your loved ones, and other New Yorkers with Medicare and Medicaid? Then we want to learn from your first-hand experience and work with you to advocate for your rights as well as the rights of all New Yorkers with Medicare and Medicaid with long-term care needs. For more information, you can view our fact sheet. If you have questions about our work, want to share your story, or want to know more about our consumer group, email your questions to us here: info@nyduals.org.

If you are a professional working with individuals with Medicare, Medicaid, and long-term care needs in New York, we want to hear from you as well. CPRNYDE offers in-person forums, during which we engage in a dialog with the audience about their care. For more information, you can see our fact sheet, or email us: info@nyduals.org.