I recently wrote about a Tucson senior whose Social Security record was incorrectly changed to “deceased”.  This man has talked to Social Security on the phone, met with them in person at the local office, and been assured that his record has been corrected.  That was more than a month ago, but Medicare still has him as dead.

An aide from Gabrielle Gifford’s office talked to Social Security this week - but it’s Medicare that has the problem.

Wednesday, I was on a conference call with the Medicare Administrator who was talking to the press about the end-of-year deadline for Medicare beneficiaries to change their Part D and Medicare Advantage plans.  As a blogger focused Medicare I get invitations to Medicare administration conference calls with “the press”.

When it came time for questions, I decided I might as well ask the top guy at Medicare if he could fix the Tucson senior’s problem. Dr. Berwick, the boss at Medicare, asked for my phone number so he could follow up with me to see if this problem gets fixed, and one of his assistants asked me to get the details to him so he could get it fixed.

So we’ll see how long it takes to fix a Medicare problem when the top guy says “get it done!”.  I’ll report on the outcome.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 24th, 2010 at 8:54 am and is filed under Health. Tags for this post: don berwick medicare, gabrielle giffords, gabrielle giffords medicare, medicare arizona, medicare problems, medicare tucson, social security tucson. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.