Jim Jones Finds a Life-Changing Solution with Ametros Video Video & Transcript
Wheatfield’s a small farmers’ community – grow a lot of grain, a lot of corn, a lot of beans. My name is Jim Jones. I'm 59 years old.
I've lived most of my life here. My husband and I raised our family here. It's a small-town community.
There's a lot of constructions companies that work in the area around here. I worked for one of them and put in 37 years with them. I started out as a laborer right out of high school, worked my way up. They needed a maintenance supervisor to take care of the properties, and I did that for nine years till I had the injury.
We had a bad winter and there was a lot of potholes. Companies that do asphalt are shut down in the wintertime. So, we found a company that would make us the asphalt patch, and I just loaded it on a trailer, and then in the morning I would leave out early and just start hitting all the properties all over the state of Indiana. I had shoveled almost 50 ton of asphalt patch off the back of that trailer in 21 days. During that I had hurt my back - of course you think nothing's wrong, it's going to be better in a few days. It had gotten so bad that I had to remove myself and was sent to doctors. They told me that I had a 2-inch tear and two bulging discs, and why are you working – you’re done, you’re basically done, you’re not going to get over this.
People do not understand what pain does to an individual, or to their family, like my wife. I mean I have the pain, but she has to live with what has happened to me, and she sees it every day.
It was a very stressful time in our life. It just limited us on where we could go, what we could do. It was hard to watch; it was it was life changing. We ended up having to get a lawyer to get everything settled. Jim was given what they call an MSA account. This was going to be the account that was going to take care of his future needs as far as appointments, medication, whatever his need is. I kept a close watch on this account just because it was his lifeline – I mean, it was his future.
[When he settled, Jim’s attorney set him up with a professional administration company that was not Ametros]
After the settlement, our lawyer had set us up with a company that would take care of our funds, and that would involve taking care of our drugs, my doctor visits, my therapy, or anything else that involved the injury that I have. Everything was going okay for a while until we found out about the expense. It just kept going up, and up, and up. The only thing they could tell us was that it's the drug companies, it wasn't them, but we knew that was not true when we could get it from our local pharmacies for a third of the price, if not cheaper. The account was depleting and I'm like, Jim we're gonna have to make some changes, otherwise you're gonna run out of funding. He had to stop two of the medications, and he also had to stop physical therapy so that the funds would be there for the medications that he absolutely had to have. There was a lot of sacrifice and heart-wrenching decisions on what to get rid of so that what he absolutely did need would be available for him.
We contacted our lawyer and he gave us the name of a wonderful lady who works for Ametros. She changed our life. We ended up ending our contract with the previous administrator and went with Ametros. It was the best decision we have ever made. She took a lot of stress, a lot of worry, gave us hope.
Now that we have Ametros, the money is collecting back in our account. We can go anywhere and get any med now. CareGuard has saved, it's going to be thousands of dollars that they'll be saving us, allowing us to use any source, and anything available for us to get that price down on anything that we need.
Ametros makes our life easier by sending Medicare all of the reports. We don't have to wait on a UPS truck, we can go to any drugstore and get the medication that he needs. We don't have to purchase it directly from them, unlike with the previous administrator. With Ametros we had much more free range on how to get what he needs at more affordable prices. I now have a life because of Ametros, and I can't thank them enough.