manage your health care
How to Bring Out the Best in Your Health Care Team (PDF)
Making Your Health Plan Work for You (PDF)
Principles of Patients’ Rights and Responsibilities
Get Help Paying for Your Prescriptions
If you can’t afford your medicines, help may be on the way.
The Partnership for Prescription Assistance helps qualified patients who lack prescription coverage get the medicines they need through the public or private program that's right for them. Many will get the medications for free or nearly free.
Together Rx Access, a prescription savings program, helps eligible uninsured individuals and families save on the medicines they need to stay healthy and to manage chronic conditions. With a free-to-get and free-to-use card, people can save on brand-name and generic medicines right at the pharmacy counter.
For more information, click here.
Find Out More About Your Medical Condition
The National Health Council is home to approximately 50 patient advocacy groups that focus on specific chronic diseases and disabilities. You can learn a lot about your condition – treatments, management strategies, the latest research findings – by visiting their websites. Click here
Resources for Family Caregivers
A family caregiver is someone who assists a loved one who is chronically ill or disabled and who is no longer able to care for himself or herself. Caregivers can be family, friends, partners, or neighbors. But they all share the same challenges.
If you are struggling to care for a loved one, you can find resources by visiting the National Family Caregivers Association.
A member of the National Health Council, the National Family Caregivers Association educates, supports, empowers, and speaks up for the more than 50 million Americans who care for loved ones with a chronic illness or disability or the frailties of old age. NFCA reaches across the boundaries of diagnoses, relationships, and life stages to help transform family caregivers' lives by removing barriers to health and well being.
CaringBridge
CaringBridge, a National Health Council member, is a nonprofit web service that connects family and friends during a critical illness, treatment, or recovery. The service provides free websites to anyone facing a serious health event. A CaringBridge website is personal, private, and available 24/7. It helps ease the burden of keeping family and friends informed. Patients and caregivers draw strength from loved ones’ messages of support.
To learn more about CaringBridge and its services, click here.
Lotsa Helping Hands
Lotsa Helping Hands is an easy-to-use, web-based service that provides a simple, immediate way for friends, family, colleagues, and neighbors to assist loved ones in need. The service includes a private group calendar, specifically designed for organizing helpers, where everyone can pitch in with meals delivery, rides, and other tasks necessary for life to run smoothly during times of medical crisis, end-of-life caring, or family caregiver exhaustion. It's also a place to keep these "circles of community" informed with status updates, photo galleries, message boards, and more. It’s free and private.
To create a Lotsa Helping Hands caregiving community, click here.
Not ready to create a caregiving support website today? Check back to this NHC webpage and use these links in the future.
“A Patient Voice” Exchange
“A Patient Voice” is an online community and a part of the WebMD Health Exchange Network. It is a unique digital access, distribution, and multimedia approach to serve people with chronic diseases and disabilities and their family caregivers. “A Patient Voice” brings trusted experts together with people with chronic conditions to freely share information in both public forums and private, invitation-only settings. WebMD turned to the NHC in search of “health experts” on non-clinical topics of interest to people with chronic diseases and disabilities. The WebMD Expert for the Exchange is nationally recognized patient advocate Richard M. Cohen, a former news anchor, New York Times bestselling author, and public speaker on the doctor-patient relationship. He is also a cancer survivor living with multiple sclerosis. From time to time, he is joined by guest experts provided by the NHC.
Click here to visit “A Patient Voice” and share your thoughts and concerns.
