Welcome to Medicare Sherpa! Our site serves as a guide to your retirement and our editors scour the Internet daily to find experts, articles and content to help retirees weigh the total impact of their healthcare, financial and personal decisions. We will help you measure the effect of your actions and help you balance both the mental and physical weight of those choices. We want to encourage each of you share your personal experiences and tell us about the actions you took prior to retirement and how your current experiences are shaping your dreams and goals for a meaningful retirement. Together we will work with each of you to ensure this site serves as a guide through that experience.

Online communities have been around since the early days of the Internet. So what's different today? Communities like Medicare Sherpa offer the ability to create relationships online through networking. Your network starts with the creation of a "profile" and quick invitation to your "friends". The profile is your home base. It can contain personal information about a wide range of interests, you can create topical groups, manage events and even publish your own blog. As you accumulate friends, join other groups and help other members -- Medicare Sherpa will reward you with Karma Points. The more you contribute, the more Karma Points you earn ... the more your personal status grows.

Why Join Medicare Sherpa? It's Free!

Our Mission: to provide free, unbiased and up-to-date health insurance information, drug pricing research tools, medicare advantage research tools and assistance to Medicare beneficiaries of all ages and their caregivers.

Our Vision: to create an even playing field for consumers and the professionals that serve them by giving consumers a voice to express their satisfaction and dissatisfaction with insurance products and services.

Our Values: We value your privacy. The following data is collected during registration: user name, user password, user email, name (optional), city, state and zip.  The first three are required to help manage your account and prevent site spam - robots creating fake user accounts. Your email address is used to help manage the recovery of your user name and password. Your name is optional, but for those promoting professional services it is required. We reserve the right to remove any individuals who violate our terms of use.  The last three fields are required to help manage our editorial calendar across the geographies we serve and to sell advertising.  We do not rent our email lists and we do not send emails to our site members. Please report any violations of this policy to our site administrator.

Your Research Tools: We've partnered with DestinationRx to provide their Drug Price Search Engine (My Medicine Cabinet) and their Plan Finder (Medicare Part D Comparison Tool) free of charge:

• My Medicine Cabinet: This powerful search engine can be used to find the retail cost of over 50,000 prescription drugs in any zip code within the U.S. The tool can be used to find lower cost alternative drugs to save you money, compare prices at thousands of pharmacies, and easily understand the safety of your drugs.
• My Medicare Plan Comparison Tool:  This research tool will help you estimate your total annual out of pocket costs for each plan based on your medications and health condition, versus only comparing premium prices. This tool will also help you to compare not only stand alone Prescription Drug Plans (PDP) but also Medicare Advantage Plans that include Part D (MAPD).
• My Resource Directory: Our free online resource directory for Massachusetts residents in need of assistance for fuel, housing, food, health care, and other basic services. The staff at Medicare Sherpa has compiled a comprehensive list of services compiled in our online catalog.

 Your Networking Tools

It all starts with your profile and we offer the following applications free of charge to help you network with other retirees nationwide:

• Wall Manager - easy way to keep everyone updated on what you are doing right now,
• Group Manager - easy way to coordinate discussions on any topic of interest with you and your friends,
• Event Manager - easy way to create and promote events taking place right in your own community,
• Blog Manager - easy way to create, write, promote your blog, and
• Address Book - easy way to keep track of your friends or personal network, establish groups, promote events, and promote your blog

All these tools are designed to help you keep track your network - where they are, what they are working on, and their common interests. We make it easy to capture all those fleeting relationships, the person you met at a baseball game or seminar, and current established business relationships. You will never loose touch with that person again.

Benefits to Retirees:  Have you ever been to a cocktail party? Joined a local club like the Lodge of Elks or Knights of Columbus? Well Medicare Sherpa was founded on the same principle - we offer the ability to exchange glimpses into each others lives and nurture lasting, real life relationships. Welcome to the party, we've gathered the experts, pundits and a few court jesters to engage you on a personal level. More importantly we've kept the technology transparent. In less than a minute you can register, create a profile and start your first article for that blog you meant to start last summer.

• keep it simple, use our tools to organize your car, sports, garden or stock trading club
• start a blog to promote your short stories, recipes, or healthcare experiences
• promote events for your band, music, poetry, rants, or political raves

Benefits to Professionals: Medicare Sherpa is a community resource for retirees in New England. Our site serves as a conduit for promoting local volunteers and the professionals who service the needs of retirees. On our site you will find Medicare counselors (SHINE), palliative care professionals, financial counselors, health insurance professionals, legal counselors, nurses, physicians, and community advocates with a wealth of expertise and experience in servicing the needs of retirees. While we do not allow our members to mass-mail each other on their interest, we encourage you to publish and promote content to grow your network.  Use your profile, groups, events and blog to quickly grow your network, share ideas and create referrals.  Are you encouraging your community or customers to rave about you?

• keep it simple, use our tools to organize your community and engage them on a personal level, build karma and good will
• leverage our tools to accommodate every type of media including words, images, video and sound
• all the content on our site is automatically syndicated and republished across the Internet to help attract potential new customers

We hope you enjoy the site and encourage you to Join Today!

About the Author:

My name is Dana Cutter and I am Founder and Editor of Medicare Sherpa. Our staff spends their days searching the Internet for the best content and advice on retirement.  On our site you will find articles on Social Security, Medicare Benefits, Prescription Drug Benefits and more. Please feel fee to send me an email with ideas for content, site improvements or general help launching your online persona. I hope you will consider joining and I am looking forward to reading more about you online.

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