If you see the other Lynn Hamilton, would you let her know the gig is up?

Yes, it happened to me--the solvent curmudgeon. Suspicious of debt, I NEVER shop on line, never disclose my credit card number over the internet, even on secured lines, and pay off my very occasional charged purchase at the end of the month. Because of these eccentric practices, the real Lynn Hamilton gets turned down for credit all the time.

When I told my mother I was the victim of identity theft, she didn't believe me. "Why would anyone steal your identity? It's too undesirable," was her comment.

So it's especially aggravating to learn that, armed with only my correct social security number, somebody MASQUERADING as me was able to get a credit card with J.C. Penney and charge up over $3000 in merchandise that now shows up on all my credit reports.

My first indication of trouble was when Discover Company sent me a letter, with the heading "fraud alert," saying they had received a credit application from me, but they had some questions.

Well, no, I hadn't applied for a Discover card, if that's the question.

What looked like it might just be a routine mix up led to free credit reports from all the major credit reporting agencies.

Trips to my mail box turned into good scripts for a horror flick as I opened one credit report after another on which the information was about 5% accurate. I just have to note here that if I had this kind of track record as a journalist, I wouldn't be allowed to write for the flat earth club newsletter.

Turns out someone operating in the Chicago area has been running around applying for credit using a variation of my name, a variation of my birthday (close, but no cigar), and my correct-to-the-digit social.

To their credit, most companies have shot the other Lynn Hamilton down for a charge card. But not J.C. Penney. No, Penney was more than happy to give L Marie Hamilton or whoever she is a credit card. When she immediately charged up over $3000 in merchandise, they let her, despite the $1500 limit which appears to have been academic.

Penney's fraud department in Albuquerque, New Mexico, told me that no, they did not know where the application had originated from. It was mailed in. Nor, check this out, did they know where it had been mailed TO.

It was, and I'm quoting directly here, "forwarded to Mexico, and that's where it was inputted."

Nevertheless, this account, closed by Penney's when they slowly became suspicious, will remain on my credit history until the company deigns to do an investigation. Equifax refuses to remove the account at my request.

Everyone I have talked to agrees on one thing: This is my fault. I haven't guarded my social security number carefully enough, I've been told.

In my mind, lately, I've been going over the many places one is obliged to give out one's social security number. If you apply to college, if you apply for a job, if you even sell a piece of work (in my case, a newspaper or magazine article), sometimes even when you just need to write a check, you are expected to fork over your social security number.

To guard your social security number completely, then, you need to be able to do without an education, a job, and a free copy of your credit report when your number falls into the wrong hands, anyway. When I called the credit reporting agencies, the very first thing they wanted was my social, though why I should trust them still isn't clear.

My own unpopular analysis of this problem is that no one wants to wait until they can actually afford all the toys they crave, and businesses are far too anxious to put people under the yoke of high-interest loans.

But, as usual, I'm a lone voice howling in the wilderness. (Howling with pain, lately.)

I'm not alone in having my identity stolen, however. Hurl a frisbee in any direction, you'll hit someone who has had a similar problem. While my cousin Scott and his wife Zelda (names changed to protect THEIR identity) were on vacation, someone in their hometown opened an account for them at Hecht, a company, like Penney, that doesn't do much homework before letting someone charge up three grand.

Even though Scott and Zelda are millionaires a few times over, Hecht put them through a humiliating wringer before conceding they weren't just trying to welsh on a debt.

The kind and patient police detective who filed a report for me had his own story. He thought he was using a secured line while shopping on the internet, but 900 numbers he KNEW he never called started showing up on his credit card bill.

Even Tech journalist Jim Louderback suffered a series of illegal transfers of cash from his bank account to an unknown shyster's credit card. If even technology's spokesmen are vulnerable to this sort of thing, I despair.

I have learned a couple useful things from this experience that I'm happy to pass on to you:

1. You CAN get free copies of your credit reports from the major credit reporting agencies, Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion--by reporting yourself as a victim of fraud. At the rate we are going, pretty much everyone can assume they are or will be a victim, so I have no compunction about recommending you circumvent the usual $8.50 cost of obtaining a (probably innaccurate) report as follows: Call Experian at 1 888 397-3742 and follow the automated instructions for having a fraud alert put on your report. At the end of this process, Experian will give you the toll free numbers for the other two CRAs. Call them, and go through the same process.

2. One of the many ways unsavory people get hold of your personal info is via those pre-approved credit offers distributed through mass mailings. You know: "You! have already been approved for our card! Fill out this application today! to get your free gift garbage!" If one of these enthusiastic offers strays to the wrong address--say an apartment you moved out of 15 years ago, the new tenant can fill the application out and possibly establish a line of credit using your identify. Or somebody can pull it out of the trash. (As this is probably what happened to me, I have lots of imagined scenarios. If you want to hear about them in pornographic detail, email me.) A little known fact of identity theft protection is that you can call 1 (888) 567-8688 and request that your name be taken off lists for these unsolicited credit and insurance offers.

And if you see the other Lynn Hamilton while she's out shopping at the mall with my card, will you tell her she needs to acquire some taste, or she'll surely be busted. If the real Lynn Hamilton were into buying on time, she would have opened an account at Sax Fifth Avenue or Godiva, not Penney's, for god's sake.

Lynn Hamilton is a freelance writer living on Tybee Island, Georgia. Contact her at lynn_hamilton@excite.com.

Will Dubya fulfill his promise to middle- and low-income seniors stranded by Medicare? In all his talk about health care reform, president elect George W. neglected to mention the one program through which some middle-class patients currently get their needed meds for free: the pharmaceutical industry's patient drug assistance program.

In 1992, fear of federally-imposed cost ceilings on medications goaded the pharmaceutical industry into formalizing a program through which people who can't afford to fill their prescriptions can get their drugs direct from the manufacturers, at no cost.

So why are so many seniors and disabled still unable to get the meds they need? It's partly because drug companies have kept their drug assistance programs as well closeted as a CEO affair with an exotic dancer. Patients don't know about it, doctors don't know about it. Evidently even politicians don't know about it.

In addition, patients trying to avail themselves of the program find themselves buried in paperwork.

"The drug companies didn't tell Congress that they would make the programs so difficult to access that average people can't make use of them," says Holly Smith, who runs a volunteer agency that helps seniors and the disabled fill out the multiple-page applications.

Many patients stumble over the demand for a detailed analysis of their income and assets. Yet another part of the application must be filled out by the patient's physician. Many applications founder there, because doctors do not automatically feel obliged to complete the many forms required to help their patients get free medications.

Add to that, all applications must be renewed every 90 days, even for meds which must be taken for the rest of the patient's life, like insulin and blood pressure medicines. Why do pharmaceutical companies make the sick and elderly redo all that paperwork four times a year?

"Well, most people don't stay on these programs forever," says Grayson of PhRMA, the lobbying arm of the pharmaceutical industry. Well, that's true. Eventually, the patient dies, all the sooner if he doesn't get the maintenance drug he needs.

Complicating the process even more, every drug manufacturer uses a different form, and a separate application must be made for each different drug. Getting seniors and the disabled their medicines would be a lot easier if companies could agree to use one standardized form, Smith says.

But Grayson says that anti-trust laws governing advertising prevent companies from creating a single form. Dispensing free medications is a form of advertising, he claims.

If so, it's a form of advertising that hasn't generated much attention. Even Citizens for Better Medicare spokesperson, Dan Zielinski, was unaware of it, when contacted for this article.

"It's not an item our coalition has taken a position on," he said.

His unfamiliarity with the program that most obviously solves the problem of seniors who can't afford their drugs NOW might be puzzling. After all, Citizens for Better Medicare's avowed mission which is "reform of Medicare to give seniors prescription drug benefits," according to Zielinski. But a recent article by Sam Loewenberg published in Legal Times helps shed some light, here. Loewenberg shows the group was, in fact, founded by the drug industry which is also its principal sponsor.

Even many physicians don't know about the no-cost drugs program. As patients can be referred to the program only by their doctors, many sick and elderly people who need no-cost medicines could be unaware that a program exists to help them.

"The companies themselves don't publicize it greatly. They don't want it so well-known that a major part of their business is giving away drugs," says Rosalyn Taylor, a Georgia physician who spends around three hours a week doing the paperwork needed to get life-saving drugs for some of her patients and dedicates a portion of her staff to the project as well.

Understandably, Taylor would prefer a simpler method of serving low-income patients--prescription cards, perhaps. In the meantime, though "If I'm going to try to get them well, and this is the only way we can get it, this is the only way we can get it," she says.

The difficulty of navigating patient drug assistance applications has spawned numerous agencies that help the chronically ill fill out mountains of forms. MedBank in Savannah, Georgia is a prototype for many similar organizations which are run with mostly volunteer labor. It's got to be one of the most unglamorous volunteer jobs in the universe of "giving back."

MedBank Executive Director Holly Smith describes her clients as people who have slipped through the cracks of Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance coverage. Of course, with Medicare providing no prescription drug benefits, the cracks are huge. And the number of people who need assistance is ever growing, Smith says.

"Most of the people we're helping have worked all their lives," says Smith. "They were in low paying jobs, or they are widows who were insured under their husbands' policies" [and those policies do not provide a drug benefit.] "Drugs weren't as expensive as they are now when their husbands were working, if they are in their 80s. Not so many drugs were used for maintenance," she adds.

Smith emphasizes that drug assistance programs and MedBank save her local community a lot more than the $170,000 a year MedBank costs. When low-income patients get the maintenance medications they need, communities save the cost of needless trips to the emergency room. A mid-size city can save $3.8 million a year in cost avoidance.

"It's so much cheaper just to give these people their medicines. When people get their drugs and take them, they don't wind up in the hospital," she says.

Drug assistance also helps elderly and disabled people remain self-sufficient, Smith says. Many patients could avoid state nursing facilities and subsidized housing if they received their prescribed medicines.

Smith points to a Harvard University study of New Hampshire's decision, one year, to cut its drug benefit associated with Medicaid. Over two years, there was an 80% increase in New Hampshire residents entering nursing homes and emergency rooms because they couldn't afford their prescriptions. "They got smart and reinstated the drug benefit, and these figures dropped dramatically again," Smith says.

But MedBank and the drug assistance programs face an uncertain future under a new presidential administration. If Medicare is reformed to include more drug benefits for low-income seniors, the drug assistance programs could become redundant.

This would not be a bad thing, of course, if patients were still able to get the medications they need through another avenue.

But Smith worries that pharmaceutical companies, which provide the patient assistance program on a purely voluntary basis, may use the excuse of reformed health care to abandon the program altogether, leaving some patients stranded.

"The drug companies could shut the whole thing down at any moment, and say, sorry no more free medicine," Smith says. "I think they're probably rejoicing every evening, thinking 'Pretty soon we won't be having to provide these drugs.'"

Even PhRMA couldn't predict the impact of Bush's health care reform on the patient assistance program.

"There's no way of knowing. Those programs are bare bones," said Mark Grayson, Senior Director of Public Affairs at PhRMA.

The reforms might mean less pharmaceutical industry assistance to seniors who would be able to get their prescription drugs through Medicare, Grayson indicated. But proposed changes would not make the patient assistance program redundant, he admitted.

"This is not just for seniors. There will still be people not on Medicare and unable to afford insurance," he said.

Changes to MedBank and the drug assistance programs are particularly hard to predict as, to Smith's knowledge, Bush made no reference to such programs in his recent campaign. This, despite the fact that information about MedBank was made available to him.

"They [presidential candidates] should have been aware of this program," Smith says. "Nobody was saying we will combine these reforms with the existing drug providing programs. A key to making any campaign work would be leaving this program in place."