Seniors Find Medicare Drug Plan Options Bewildering

Yet, Moran added, "I want to emphasize, I don't think you have a choice. You've got to sign up for it."

Questions and concerns took on greater urgency after enrollment officially commenced this week. Calls to the Medicare Rights Center, an independent, New York-based organization, quadrupled over previous weeks' volume.

"People know the marketing materials arrived in the mail . . . that there's a benefit, but whether it's right for them is a complete mystery to them," spokeswoman Deane Beebe said yesterday afternoon. "We're still trying to figure out what to tell them."

The Fairfax Area Agency on Aging has trained volunteers to assist local residents who walk through the door, sometimes carrying a shoebox of pill bottles. The seniors listen carefully but, invariably toward the end of the conversation, lean in close and lower their voices.

"They say, 'What would you do?' " program coordinator Howard Houghton said. When the counselors explain that they can't cross that line, their clients try a different approach: " 'What would you tell your mother to do?' "

The luckiest seniors -- among them, retired federal employees and veterans -- need not worry any because they already have coverage equal to or better than the new plans. Even if that coverage changes or ends and they move to Medicare, they will not risk the uncapped penalty of 1 percent a month for their delay.

For others, it will come to this: worrying for much of the next six months over what to choose.

"I shudder when I think of all of it," Gloria Nagan admitted after listening in on a Thursday evening presentation at The Irene, a high-rise in Friendship Heights. She took away a 12-columned spreadsheet laying out the broad particulars of the plans available in Maryland.

"How do you pick?" she asked.

Around computers in an Alexandria apartment complex's community center, several seniors paired yesterday with workers from the city's Office of Aging and Adult Services and tried to make sense of the future.

Social worker Irene Ilachinski sat with Maria Tarzi and looked over her list of medicines. "I don't know if there's a plan that takes all of them," she said, "but we'll see what's available at least."

Ilachinski called up the online Medicare Prescription Drug Plan Finder and began clicking on specific brand names: Zocor, Plavix, Nexium and a half-dozen more. Thirty-five plans popped up.

A few feet away, MaryAnn Griffin typed in the same details and appropriate dosages for Tarzi's cousin, Mahboub Rafik, and then hit enter. The results: 40 possibilities, from a Humana plan with annual costs of $3,880.66 to a plan from PacifiCare that might run $10,257.12 a year.

"Well," Griffin said to Rafik, "we're not going to take that one, are we?"