Moderators

This community is designed to give professionals and volunteers engaged in this important work the chance to learn from each other and from experts in the field, to share promising practices, to try to solve problems together, and to access critical information, training materials and other educational resources, in a moderated setting.

Your moderators have had extensive experience educating and counseling Medicare beneficiaries and supporting Medicare professionals like you. You can explore our community knowing that the content and the discussions are managed by experts.

Meet the moderators:

• Hilary Dalin is Associate Director, My Medicare Matters with NCOA. She has worked to enable Medicare beneficiaries to understand their rights by strengthening the quality and effectiveness of Medicare beneficiary education and personalized counseling. Previously, she held positions at the Health Assistance Partnership at Families USA and at the Center for Medicare Advocacy.

  Ms. Dalin has worked with State Health Insurance Assistance Programs (SHIPs), state and local agencies on aging and other aging network professionals. She has taught elder law at law schools in New York and Connecticut and is a former Chair of the Elder Law Section of the Connecticut Bar Association. In addition, Ms. Dalin has written and lectured on topics related to Medicare, Medicaid, home and community-based care as an alternative to institutionalization, the rights of nursing home residents, and benefits education and counseling skills.

• Marisa Scala-Foley is associate director of the Access to Benefits Coalition, which NCOA chairs. She is a former director of the Center for Medicare Education (CME) at the Institute for the Future of Aging Services in Washington, D.C.

  Throughout her career, Ms. Scala-Foley has focused on issues related to developing accessible educational materials and infrastructure for health-care and long-term-care education (for consumers and professionals), consumer navigation of the U.S. health-care and long-term-care systems, and consumer direction in long-term care for older adults. She has also authored numerous publications in these areas.

• Wendy Zenker is the director of Mobilization for NCOA’s Benefits Access Group. She oversees the activities of the Access to Benefits Coalition (ABC) and directs the My Medicare Matters campaign, a community-based education program.

  Prior to joining NCOA, Ms. Zenker was the Chief Operating Officer at the Corporation for National and Community Service, the agency that oversees the Senior Corps programs, AmeriCorps and AmeriCorps*VISTA.