ECONOMIC SURVIVAL GUIDE
In these tough economic times, we offer readers a survival guide, in the form of brief artciles to help them cope.
OVERVIEW Not all tips are helpful
JOB LOSS Unemployment benefits
MEDICATION How to get prescription help
COBRA Getting on COBRA
HEATING AID Help with heat
MORTGAGE HELP Ways to stay in your home
FOOD Food services: Do you qualify?
UTILITIES Help with utility bills
TRANSPORTATION Bus, train info
CLOTHING Good clothing for e few dollars
Chances are that if you watch enough television, you've seen the "Help Is Here" express, the gleaming bus that rolls into a community near you with talk show host Montel Williams promising a way out of high-cost prescription drugs.

That's the offer that the Partnership for Prescription Assistance, of which Williams is pitchman, throws out. According to its Web site, in the past four years it's helped 3.7 million people gain access to free or low-priced prescriptions. It claims that it can do this because it brings together a coalition of pharmaceutical companies, doctors and patient advocacy groups.

But there's a bit of a catch.

To qualify for the pharmacy industry-funded organization's help, a patient must lack prescription coverage altogether, and meet certain income limits for some of the 475 public and private patient assistance programs it screens applicants for. The Partnership for Prescription Assistance bills itself as one-stop shopping where consumers can go to see if they qualify for prescription help. Its Web site is www.pparrx.org.

There are other patient assistance Web sites worth looking at. In fact, a Google Boolean search of "prescription help" + "patient assistance" turned up more than 12 million hits, indicating that this is a subject that despite the anemic economy has a robust following.

But before you cruise the Internet for these programs, consider some practical advice from pharmaceutical sales drug reps, doctors and medical

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office managers. First, ask your doctor for samples of the medication, especially antibiotics and allergy medication, prescribed for you. Explain whatever hardship you have affording these prescriptions, and ask your medical provider to contact the pharmaceutical company's patient-assistance department to provide you with free or discounted prescriptions. You'd be surprised, a pharmaceutical representative says, how often these drug companies do help.

Pharmaceutical companies are willing to provide everything from antibiotics to asthma drugs to diabetes medication as well as cholesterol-lowering drugs.

MARIAN GAIL BROWN