Table 2.

Medication Nonadherence and Physician–patient Dialogue (All Items Refer to the Last 12 Months)

	Total	3+ Chronic conditions (35.2%)*
Rates of medication nonadherence (%)
Any nonadherence†-	40.1	52.1
Any cost-related nonadherence	26.3	34.9
Not filling prescription because of cost	18.3	24.9
Skipping doses to make prescription last longer	15.8	21.8
Taking a smaller dose to make prescription last longer	12.4	18.5
Any nonadherence not related to cost	28.2	37.4
Nonadherence because of experiences‡	24.4	33.8
Nonadherence because of self-assessed need‡	14.5	18.8
Physician–patient dialogue (% yes)
Did your doctor talk with you about all your medicines?	68.2	75.8
Did you talk with any of your doctors about prescription medicine costs?	30.9	41.3
Did you talk with any of your doctors about changing a medicine because it was making you feel worse or was not working?	28.9	41.9

We applied sampling weights to all results to correct for difference in sampling probabilities across the strata. The total observed sample size was 17,569, of which 5,739 had 3 or more chronic conditions.

*For each row, we examined the trend for 0, 1, 2, and 3 or more chronic conditions, and for each the trend was significant, P < .001. For simplicity, we present only the rates for 3 or more conditions.

^†“Any cost-related nonadherence” refers to beneficiaries who reported nonadherence on any of the cost or noncost items (items 1–3 and 5–8 in the Appendix).

^‡These rows each summarize 2 survey items.