Uh Ellen is absent.

I'm here.

Tomorrow.

How we're Liz.

Here.

Okay.

I guess we have a senior service provider, regional community partner presentation.

Yes.

So I'd like to introduce Michael Thompson.

Michael is the outreach coordinator for HICAP, and we've worked together probably the last three or four years at least, maybe before that.

And he's a great resource for our community.

So I'm glad he's here to present today.

Great.

I think I got to turn you on.

There we go.

Hi.

Thank you so much for having me today.

It's a it's a pleasure.

And it's Linda mentioned we've uh we've we've got a pretty good relationship going on there.

It's a very symbiotic one, I believe.

Uh it's one that gets a message out to the NAPA communities.

Uh it is uh we we offer a very valuable service that many people don't even know exist.

Uh we offer uh we had uh advocacy issues um for Medicare for the seniors and for the disabled here in Napa counties.

Um so yeah, Linda, I think we've had a relationship for more than four years, but you and I have been in communication for like the last four years.

So I just have a quick um, I just have a quick slideshow that we'll run through.

My first question though is how many people have heard of HICAP before?

See, there is part of the problem.

So we are an advocacy program.

We've been put together uh back in the mid-80s by politicians uh who were receiving, and I'm sure if anybody here is on Medicare, you've received this wonderful book here called Medicare in You.

And we just got the 2025 version, just came out last week.

So if you haven't got that in the mail, look for it because you're gonna get it.

But if you've spent any time looking at this, the average beneficiary is expected to get this, read through it, and completely understand how their Medicare works.

And if you've ever tried that, you know that it's really good for one thing going to sleep.

So the politicians have put together a program where beneficiaries can have assistance, they can call, they can receive assistance one-on-one through a certified counselor, and that program is us.

Uh Medicare uh Health Insurance Counseling and Advocacy Program.

Um believe it or not, the number is actually on the back of the book.

It says if you have questions about your Medicare, call HICAP.

So even though we are listed on the back of the Medicare book, we still, just like you folks, are we're not well known.

So thank you for having me here today.

Uh real quickly, before I get into uh my slides, I just wanted to talk briefly about some of the other community partners that we've have here in Napa.

So obviously we work with the senior center real closely.

Some of the things that we do with the senior center is we have one-on-one counseling.

Um, up until very recently, we've had one-on-one counseling available through the senior center.

What that means is we have CDA certified Medicare counselors meeting with folks in the community at the senior center, available to them to bring their materials in, have a counselor look at their materials and help them and guide them through their questions that they have through Medicare.

This could be a myriad of questions, simple questions on helping to explain to them what some of their um bills are speaking about.

Um they're being billed for, how they're being billed, and why.

Those are many of the questions that we get.

We are coming up onto the annual enrollment period for um Medicare real quickly, October 15th through December 7th.

We are flooded with questions.

Um what we get is a database from CD or from CMS that informs us of all the new changes that are going to be happening in 2025 to Medicare.

What we do is we build an educational um uh class around those new changes, and then we go out to the community and we share this new information with the community members.

And it's community partners like the Petaluma Senior Center, like uh Riyonda House, um, and even the libraries.

So we work real closely with the Napra uh library systems.

Lawrence is new over there, and he's been wonderful in helping us to organize and schedule these events.

We have a four-part education series that we offer annually, one presentation or one class per quarter.

So we go around to each one of these libraries to the community centers, and we help and we educate the beneficiaries on their Medicare myriad of issues.

Each topic or each class has different topics and different levels of detail designed to help the members understand their Medicare better.

So those are some of the ways that we work with the Napa communities.

But real briefly, if you want to take a look at the screen there, HICAP, again, Medicare Health Insurance Counseling and Advocacy program.

We help the community by one-on-one counseling, again, educational series.