"The Senior Health Insurance Benefits Assistance program helps people with Medicare understand their coverage, and untangle problems with it. It takes 50 hours just to go through the training for this complex work. There are 25 volunteers, but these 3 stand out because of the support they provide to the entire group:
Zina Owen has kept things flowing smoothly at 64 Fall Enrollment events over the past 10 years; Donna Earnest has helped in many areas, and has entered roughly 11 thousand data forms in just the past five years to help us track our service; Marilyn Bishop has helped nearly 100 people with Medicare over the past four years, enduring an erratic schedule, and sometimes a long commute, to cover appointments for other volunteers.
We could not provide good customer service for the 108,000 Medicare beneficiaries in Multnomah County without the skilled help of these volunteers."
— Janet Bowman, SHIBA Program Coordinator with the Department of County Human Services’ Aging, Disability and Veterans Services