Drug plan and its donut hole

This much-touted new Medicare drug Plan D may be helping a few people somewhere, but I haven't met any of them. It sure as heck isn't helping me.

I have Lupus, among other problems, and I have eight maintenance drug prescriptions that I fill monthly. My former Blue Cross plan included drug coverage and worked fairly well, but it was canceled when Part D was born.

This new plan is supposed to be cheaper, which it won't turn out to be, and it doesn't work at all. It's June and I'm in the doughnut hole already. The next $1,300 are for me to pay.

I'm getting ready to go to a fun and relaxing convention, to be gone for three weeks. I called Blue Cross for a vacation override, as virtually all my prescriptions will need a refill while I'm gone. I've gotten vacation overrides before, but suddenly I can't get one any more. It seems that if you take your vacation in the good ole U.S. of A and put your money into our own economy, you are penalized by the situation being made so difficult that it isn't worth it to even make the trip. If you spend your funds in the European economy, however, no problem.

I'm flying to a convention in Georgia, where all transportation will consist of groups of us on large busses. I don't know if there will be a single person there with a car. Yet I'm supposed to figure out how to go out and find a drug store in Harlem, GA, a town of 1 7,000 people and get my eight refills there. Just how am I supposed to do that? And since everyone of my pill bottles says there are no more refills left on the original prescription, I either have to waste a whole day here going from doctor to doctor to get a new paper prescription to take with me, or I have to ask some small town pharmacist to make five or six long distance calls to Los Angeles, with the time difference in play, to get authorizations from my various doctors, to give me the pills I need to keep going.

I may be going to a Laurel and Hardy convention ? but I sure didn't expect my brand new drug program to be designed by them. What is the reasoning behind all this?

If I'm leaving the country, I can have an override and get a two-month supply. If I stay stateside, I have to jump through hoops to get my pills.

How am I supposed to break away from a convention where one event follows another and demand that someone else drop out and take me to a drug store so I can sit and wait an hour or so while a small-town pharmacist checks to see if he even stocks the pills I need, or if I have to come back day after tomorrow to get them ? it's ludicrous. Plan D only benefits the pharmaceutical and insurance companies anyway, and you all know it.