New Experience ~ old problem

So....  Rose and I are in Rio Verde attempting to act like adults by getting Arizona documents, familiarizing our selves with new shopping patterns, etc.  One main concern for older folks such as ourselves is medical care ~ most especially finding a "primary care" physician.  We are only 12 miles or so from the world famous Mayo Clinic so we naturally thought what an opportunity for excellent health care access.  Our concern was, "do they accept ordinary patients such as ourselves our do they see only referral cases?  Rose called the clinic and talked to the "new patients" person.  Question:  Do you accept continuing patients?  Answer:  Oh, yes.  Rose's reply was pretty much "great" my husband and I would like to be assigned to a general practitioner - primary care physician type doctor.  After giving the person the specifics on our insurance etc. the woman's reply was a simple, "we are not accepting medicare patients at this time."  ~ meaning I suspect we don't accept medicare patients.  After the initial shock of "what have we done with our excellent health care providers in Spokane?", my thought was are we going to be able to find a provider and secondly,  wasn't Mayo Clinic one of the big supporters of Obama's healthcare program?  How in the hell can you support one government health care program and not another more established program?

The Phoenix metro area contains approximately 7.7 million people ~ something like the 7th largest city in the U.S..  After consulting the Blue Cross Blue shield web site and the Medicare.gov site we found on the web site search engines 28 doctors within 25 miles of Rio Verde who accept Medicare patients.  28!!!!  So today we traveled the 8 miles to Fountain Hills to find one of the three doctors listed in the "accepting" list.  We found that the address and telephone number listed on the web site were for an assisted living complex.  We talked with the management of the assisted living company and sure enough the address and phone number of their company matched the yellow pages for the doctors we were seeking.  Only problem is they had never heard of them and had never seen the advertisement.  The lady who Rose spoke with said, "why don't you go to Dr. so and so.  I go to her and I'm on medicare".  So we do.  She and her colleague accept medicare patients and apparently a clinic next to them do as well.  We "got signed up".   Interesting side note:  none of these doctors are on the sites of either Blue Cross or Medicare. gov.

It's a strange world we live in.  And, I'm finding, as the saying goes, old age ain't for the faint of heart.