A survey of 4,433 Americans 50 and over provides a picture of how health care and prescription costs are getting so expensive that many people can’t afford the care they need.

The 2009 survey by Employee Benefit Research Institute found that 19 percent of respondents said they had cancelled or postponed a doctor’s appointment because they couldn’t afford the cost.  21.5 percent said they had cut back on or changed their prescriptions to save money.

Many of these folks said they changed to generic drugs, which is actually a good thing because brand drugs cost 10 or more times as much as generics. But about 25%  of this group said they’d stopped taking one or more of their prescriptions because of the cost.

To make matters worse, the respondents who cut back on their prescriptions were generally people who said they had health problems.

Not unsurprisingly, the groups most likely to cut back on prescriptions and doctor visits were single women, African-Americans, and people who never got a high school degree.

Let’s do our own survey here:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 6th, 2012 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Health. Tags for this post: health care costs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.