Healthcare affordability is beginning to impact not just those without health insurance or those who don’t make a lot of money. These days, more than one-quarter of non-senior adults are living with severe healthcare affordability issues, such as high out-of-pocket cost burden, medical debt, or forgone medical care, according to a recently published study. When you factor in delaying medical care, the percentage of adults with affordability issues jumps to 46%.
Why This Matters: Medical debt is not just something that impacts people at the lower end of the economic spectrum or those who aren’t fortunate enough to have health insurance. Collectors can’t make assumptions about the type of people who are on the other end of the phone when attempting to collect on a medical debt anymore. In one way this is good news for collectors, because it means that individuals may have more income to put toward medical debt payments if they are higher up the earnings ladder.
- While healthcare affordability is becoming more of an issue for everyone, it is still most predominantly felt by those at or below the poverty line. The poverty line for a family of four is $30,000.
What Has Helped: Individuals with employer-sponsored health insurance had “substantially” fewer healthcare problems than those with private, non-group, Medicaid and other public coverage or no coverage at all, according to the report. Other measures, like the Inflation Reduction Act, have also helped individuals with affordability issues.
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