Survey: Nearly 25% of Women Missed Care Because of Cost
The high cost of health care is keeping a “significant minority” of American women from getting the medical care they need, according to a new national survey.
About one in four U.S. women skipped or delayed needed health care in the course of a year, while more than one in five couldn’t afford to fill at least one prescription during that time. Fewer men reported the same barriers: 16% of men skipped or delayed care and 13% didn’t fill a prescription.
“These are bigger numbers than I expected to see ... and a real cause for concern,” said Drew Altman, president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, which released the survey last week. “We pay for that in the end, because when people delay care, they are sicker when they get care. They suffer in terms of their health and we wind up paying more than we should as a society.”
Women who delayed or skipped care often did so because they lacked insurance: a fifth of those surveyed reported being uninsured, with higher numbers among the poor and some minorities. Among low-income women, a third had no health insurance. Having a job did not guarantee access to health benefits: Nearly 60% of women without health insurance worked full time or part time.
The survey found that many of those not getting care are sick. One in three of the adult women surveyed had a health condition such as arthritis, asthma, hypertension or depression, requiring ongoing medical treatment. In addition, half of the women regularly took prescription medications.
And among all the women surveyed, 16% described their health as fair or poor. Of those in the poorest health, nearly half said they needed to see a doctor but didn’t in the past year. Nearly 25% reported having trouble getting tests or treatment approved by their health plan in the previous two years.
Altman said that although the current survey may not have addressed the issue directly, women tend to make the family’s health-care decisions, so their views and satisfaction are key. The survey found that women were especially concerned about out-of-pocket health costs; 56% said such costs were very important to them.
The survey was based on telephone interviews with 3,966 women age 19 to 64, who were asked about their health care in the past year, and telephone interviews of 700 men conducted for comparison.
The prescription drug problems hit poor and minority women particularly hard, the study found. Women who said that cost kept them from filling a prescription included 40% of the survey subjects without insurance and 27% of those on Medicaid (known as Medi-Cal in California). Cost was still a factor for some women who had private insurance: 15% of them reported foregoing at least one prescription.
About 28% of the women said they were uninsured at some point in the past year.
Half of those with gaps in their insurance reported going without health benefits for more than a year, a fact that Altman said contrasted with a common belief that people sometimes go without health insurance for only a brief time.
