It has taken Betty Cox literally months to find the right Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit plan for her, but her search was brought to a close with just an hour of help.

Cox was one of the many seniors who attended a Friday morning workshop at the Park Avenue Apartments. The seminar was held by the national group My Medicare Matters.

“We’ve been doing this for three months and we couldn’t get a plan, we couldn’t figure out which one to pick,” said Cox’s daughter Michele Freels. “If we hadn’t come here, I don’t know what we’d have done.”

Cox said that having the right plan for her was a load off her mind.

“Yes, definitely,” Cox said. “It was very complicated.”

Christine O’Connor, My Medicare Matters educator, loves to hear things like this.

She travels around five Ohio counties, helping seniors navigate the often-confusing maze that makes up the drug benefit system.

“It’s very, very complicated,” O’Connor said. “If they think they understand it, they probably don’t.”

Luckily for locals, the National Council on Aging has formed the My Medicare Matters group, which helps save seniors money by choosing the right one of Ohio’s 43 different Medicare plans.

“I had a couple spending $10,000 a year between their supplemental policies, and I got them on a Medicare HMO to save them over $8,000 a year,” O’Connor said.

O’Connor said that although there were a lot of opportunities, some would not actually be better off under the new plan.

“The people it doesn’t help as much are the really low-income people who have been getting it for free at the clinics, because they’re going to have to pay nominal amounts per prescription,” O’Connor said. “That doesn’t seem so bad, but some of them take 15 prescriptions and it adds up.”

But for those that the plan is right for, there are some big benefits.

“Generally, people will pay a little more than half of what they used to,” O’Connor.

For those who missed the workshop, there’s a lot more information at www.mymedicarematters.org — where seniors can do like Betty Cox and find the perfect plan for their drug needs.