Almost all older adults (88.6%) take prescription medications and 82.7% of all seniors aged 65 and older have prescription drug insurance coverage, according to a CDC report published in September. At the same time, a much smaller percentage of seniors (3.6%) did not get the prescriptions they needed due to cost, and 3.4% did not take their medications as prescribed due to cost, the report showed.
The report, titled “Prescription Medication Use, Coverage, and Nonadherence Among Adults Age 65 and Older: United States, 2021–2022,” shows that high costs in the United States cause many older Americans to forego the medications they need due to drug costs. For comparison, the report shows senior citizens in other high-income nations do not face the same challenges paying for their prescriptions, according to research RAND published in February 2024. In that report, the RAND researchers showed that the prices of prescription drugs in the United States were almost three times higher than they were for people living in 33 other countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
For brand-name drugs, the RAND researchers showed that the prices of those drugs in the United States were, on average, 4.22 times higher than those in the other nations, as we reported at the time.
Journalists seeking to write about this issue can reach out to seniors willing to discuss how they struggle to afford their medications and how, as the report shows, rising prescription drug costs can be particularly challenging.
For example, the CDC report shows that between 2020 and 2021, out-of-pocket costs for retail drugs rose 4.8% to $63 billion. Among adults, about 25% have reported difficulty affording their prescription medications, according to an October KFF report.
One of the most important points in the CDC report is that older adults who lacked prescription drug coverage were more likely not to get a prescription medication and not to take a drug as prescribed than older adults who had prescription drug coverage. The CDC noted that failing to adhere to a physician’s medication prescription due to the costs (called cost-related nonadherence) was six times higher among older adults who also had insecurities about food compared with those who were food secure.