Allison Bills was crying so hard she could barely talk. The 53-year-old, disabled Lake Park woman lives off a monthly Social Security check and suffers tw1o neurological disorders. She was on Medicaid until December, when the federal government switched her and 430,000 other poor Floridians to the new Medicare Part D program for prescription-drug coverage.

By Wednesday, she’d run out of Clonazepam and Neurontin, perhaps the most crucial, her pain doctor’s office said, of the nearly two dozen drugs she takes daily. “If I didn’t take these medications,” said Ms. Bills, who suffers seizures and chronic pain from fibromyalgia and reflex sympathetic dystrophy, “I couldn’t get out of bed. I’d die.”

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/opinion/content/opinion/epaper/2006/01/28/a14a_medicare_edit_0128.html