Millions of American seniors are having a hard time affording their prescription medications, a new National Health Statistics report suggests.
The study, published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that approximately 4% of those aged 65 and older can’t afford their prescription at all, and more than 3% of them skipped doses, delayed filling a prescription or took less medication than prescribed to cut back on costs.
“Older adults that were food insecure were six times more likely to not get their prescription medication,” Robin A. Cohen, study co-author and statistician with the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, said.
Dr. Lalita Abhyankar, a family medicine physician based in San Francisco, told ABC News she often sees patients struggling to pay for their medications.
One of Abhyankar’s patients with diabetes couldn’t afford his monthly dose of insulin, so “he would ration out his insulin,” she said. Despite being on both Medicaid and Medicare, “the copay was challenging for him to do on a month-to-month basis,” she noted.
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