Pick a Card!#?$!

She Thought Choosing Mom's Medicare Drug Card Would Be an Easy Trick. It Turned Into a Real Stumper.

I live 50 miles away from my mom, who's 82. Because of the distance, it's not easy for me to drive her to the store or to doctor's appointments, like my sisters do.

So I offered to help pick out her Medicare drug discount card -- which, unless you've been living inside a sealed barrel in a Canadian drug warehouse for the past several weeks, you know the federal government has just introduced as its first step in making prescription drugs more affordable for Medicare recipients. Seniors can begin using the cards as early as June if they sign up for one this month.

Mom doesn't have Internet access, and since she has hearing problems, getting long, detailed information over the phone can be tough for her. And hey, I've been a health care reporter for more than a decade, conducting much of my research on the Internet. Picking the prescription card that would help my mom the most should be easy for me, right?

I figured the effort would take me an hour or so. Instead, I spent nine hours trying to track down accurate information on the phone and on the Web. The upshot? I'm not much closer to knowing which is the best card for her than when I started. I have, however, learned the following important lessons:

• Just because the Medicare.gov Web site says a drug isn't covered under a specific discount-card plan doesn't mean it really isn't.

• Just because Medicare.gov says a drug is covered doesn't mean it necessarily is.

• The prices Medicare.gov cites for medications under a given discount plan don't necessarily correspond to the prices the plan gives out over the phone.

• The prices that a card's sponsors give out over the phone can differ, depending on whom you talk with.

• Whether Medicare.gov says a pharmacy participates in a given plan doesn't seem to bear any relation to the info the plans, or even the pharmacies themselves, have.

• Calling 800-MEDICARE isn't much help. I tried the number seven times on a single day last week, starting at 9:40 a.m. and finishing at 11:20 p.m. I never got through to a human.

I started out well prepared. Mom made me a list of the nine drugs she has to pay for out-of-pocket for her fairly common conditions:

For asthma/chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD): an albuterol inhaler, Serevent Diskus and prednisone (5 mg).

For allergies: Allegra (180 mg)

For apparent glaucoma: Isopto Carbachol eyedrops (3 percent) and methazolamide (50 mg.)