Seniors See a Doctor Shortage

Lawmakers focused their election-year attention on demands by the 35-million-member AARP and other senior groups that Medicare begin covering prescription drugs. But the Senate could not agree on the details of a drug benefit, and when lawmakers in mid-October appeared on the verge of reversing some of the fee cuts for doctors, Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine) prevented her colleagues from doing one without the other.

The action left many Colorado physicians shaking their heads.

"We're not talking about big money compared to a prescription drug plan," Denver geriatrician Christopher Unrein said of Medicare reimbursements. "If you don't have someone to write the prescription, what good does a benefit do you?"

But on Denver's north side, where a handful of Democratic candidates appeared last month at a forum organized by AARP members, prescription drugs topped the agenda.

"I was more than disgusted" when Congress failed to pass a Medicare drug benefit, said Elsie Johnson of Lakewood. The 69-year-old joined a Medicare HMO that helped her pay for her many medications for diabetes, osteoporosis, high blood pressure and a thyroid condition. She said she would vote against GOP Sen. Wayne Allard on Tuesday despite being "a Republican from way back."

For most of the 75 seniors at the forum, concerns about access to doctors were lost in rhetoric about Social Security privatization and drug companies' political influence.

Yet seniors' representatives and patient advocates know the problem is real. They believe that as more Medicare beneficiaries are turned away by doctors' offices, they will begin to make a connection between their inability to find a physician in Colorado and their representatives in Washington.

Some already have.

Vi Bowers, slight but sharp in her blue AARP vest, recently had a hard time finding a gynecologist and an ophthalmologist in the Denver suburb of Wheat Ridge. Three or four OB/GYN offices told her they were not accepting new Medicare patients. Finally, she persuaded a friend's doctor to take her.

But now the 75-year-old is afraid her new doctors will drop her.

"You've got to be careful not to step on your doctor's toes," Bowers said. "They don't want to mess" with Medicare because of the low payments.

The Denver offices of Colorado Patient Advocates, the Boulder County Medicare ombudsman's help line and the private Colorado Gerontological Society are all fielding more calls from Medicare beneficiaries unable to find doctors or pay for their prescriptions