Healthwell opened its Asthma premium/copay assistance fund today!
They do a $4500 yearly grant, which can be either for your premiums if you're on private insurance and getting your insurance premiums covered is the hardest part, or copay assistance, which is VERY helpful during the Medicare Part D coverage gap.
They also have a copay fund for lupus open at the moment. (Was hoping it'd be a premium and/or copay fund, but then again some advanced lupus treatments are so expensive that making it a copay fund makes more sense.)
Some of their funds are only for people already on Medicare Part D, some offer both help with copays and premiums, some only copays. But I can tell you that it's helped me a great deal.
Currently open funds include:
Acromegaly
Acute Myeloid Leukemia - Medicare Access
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis
Asthma
Bone Metastases - Medicare Access
Cancer-Related Behavioral Health (Accepting phone applications only)
Chemotherapy Induced Neutropenia - Medicare Access
Congenital Sucrase-Isomaltase Deficiency
Cystic Fibrosis Treatments
Cystic Fibrosis Vitamins and Supplements
Dupuytren's Disease
Gout - Medicare Access
Gout Travel Fund (Accepting phone applications only)
Hepatitis C
Homocystinuria
Huntington's Disease - Medicare Access
Idiopathic Thrombocytopenic Purpura
Melanoma - Medicare Access
Multiple Myeloma - Medicare Access
Pediatric Assistance (Accepting phone applications only)
Peyronie's Disease
Porphyrias
Post Menopausal Osteoporosis - Medicare Access
Pulmonary Fibrosis
Renal Cell Carcinoma - Medicare Access
Secondary Hyperparathyroidism
Systemic Lupus Erythematosus
Tardive Dyskinesia - Medicare Access
Urea Cycle Disorders
Wilms' Tumor
https://www.healthwellfoundation.org/disease-funds/
-----
Other copay organizations that have asthma funds include PAF Copay Relief and the PAN Foundation but they are not currently accepting new applicants. Still, it's not impossible to get help from both (Healthwell for the premium help and the other two for copay help), and while I don't know when PAN will reopen their asthma fund, I have used PAN's assistance before and I believe each year it was January when the fund came open.
Essentially what most of these do for copay assistance is give you an electronic "secondary insurance" card that your pharmacy processes after it processes your primary insurance.
But if you got Marketplace coverage and have assistance with cost-sharing already built in through a Silver plan, the Healthwell grant might be better used to pay for the Marketplace coverage itself.
