Connect Health to Care Purpose HERO
Hope in Hard Times Margaret Neel provides life-saving medicines through Flaget Prescription Assistance Program By Amy Taylor
Picture a disabled farmer limping into your office in raggedy clothes. He and his wife have no health insurance. They can barely put food on the table, much less put gas in their truck. The husband, a diabetic, can’t afford insulin. Margaret Neel, the coordinator of Flaget Memorial Hospital’s Prescription Assistance Program (PAP), sees people like this every day. And every day she gives low-income people free medicines. “I help people who have no prescription medication insurance coverage and meet income guidelines,” the Nelson County native said. “I help people who have Medicare Part D when they’re in the ‘donut hole’ – that time when they’ve exhausted the year’s allowance for medicines. If they can’t do anything else, they come to me. I’m their last hope.” Some of Neel’s patients are senior citizens. Many are in their 40s or 50s. A few are immigrants. Many are disabled, but haven’t been declared disabled yet by the government, so they don’t qualify for Social Security disability payments. All of these people have one thing in common: hard times. Financial problems have forced them to go without life-saving medicines such as blood pressure pills, insulin, nitroglycerin, blood thinners and cholesterol-lowering medications. These patients touch Neel’s heart.
Photographs By Ron Perrin
Summer 2013 common thread
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