A CMS survey of Medicare patients finds them in good shape by some measures (e.g., good knees) and not-so-good shape in others (e.g., overweight or obese).
On May 24, CMS for the first time issued the Public Use File for its most recent Medicare Current Beneficiary Survey (MCBS), taken in 2013. While the 13,924 beneficiaries who completed the lengthy survey represent only a fraction of the 37.8 million registrants in the Medicare base, it paints an interesting picture of at least those beneficiaries who were conscientious enough to fill the whole thing out.
One depressing finding: At their last BMI reading, about 30% of respondents were judged obese – and nearly 5% of them suffered from “extreme or high-risk obesity.” And 35% were overweight but not obese. Only 30% were at a healthy weight for their size. (This is actually a little lower than the National Institutes of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases' estimate for all U.S. citizens, which is also depressing.)
About 38% of Medicare recipients claim to have at least some vision trouble, even when wearing glasses/contacts prescribed for them. Of note, 60% said they’d have an eye exam in the past year and 86% said they wore glasses or contacts. And 42% said they had trouble with their hearing even when they wore a hearing aid, which 11% do.
On the other hand, half of these Medicare beneficiaries have little or no trouble “stooping, crouching or kneeling,” and 62% said they would have little or no trouble walking a quarter mile. Then 58% said they hadn’t had a drink in the past month, and only 20% said they’d had as much as one drink a week. And while 59% said they had at some point in their lives been smokers, only 14% said they still smoked.
Other findings include:
- Of the 71% who say they had a flu shot last winter, 20% said they got it at a shopping mall or other store;
- Two-thirds of respondents have been diagnosed with hypertension at some time; half still have it. About 88% of respondents had their blood pressure checked “within the last six months.” And 11% had been diagnosed in the past year with “a stroke, a brain hemorrhage or a cerebrovascular accident”;
- About 28% had been diagnosed with depression at some time, 16% within the past year; asked whether they or their spouse had experienced “two weeks or more when (you/he/she) lost interest or pleasure in things that (you/he/she) usually cared about or enjoyed,” 18.5% said yes.
The full results are here.