Table 2.

Characteristics of Medicare Beneficiaries

	Medicare patients with a generalist personal doctor (N = 2,319)*
Demographics
Age in years
Mean	76
Range	65–102
Men	42%
Race
Non-Hispanic White	86%
Black	6%
Hispanic	4%
Other	4%
Education
<High school graduate	21%
High school graduate	60%
College graduate	19%
Health status
In general, how would you rate your overall health?
Excellent or very good	32%
Good	40%
Fair or poor	28%
Access to health care
Visited personal doctor in the past year	97%
Mean number of office visits in past year	3.7
Mean number of different doctors seen in past year	2.6
Importance of financial issues in deciding whether or not to get medical care
Very important	29%
Important	25%
Somewhat important	22%
Not important	24%
Patient role in health care
When you are ill, would you rate your role in managing the illness as...
More important than doctor’s	14%
Equally important as doctor’s	75%
Less important than doctor’s	11%
How important do you think it is for patients to play a large part in planning their own treatment?
Very important	54%
Somewhat important	36%
Not important	8%
Don’t know	1%
How confident are you that you can manage your health conditions?
Very	48%
Somewhat	43%
Not very	8%
No health conditions	2%

*To provide estimates representative of the community-dwelling Medicare population, calculations were weighted to account for the oversampling of African Americans