Sunday, June 29, 2008

More Americans Delay Care

By Paul Gessing

According to a new study from the Center for Studying Health System Change, more Americans delayed "necessary" care in 2007. According to a write up in the Wall Street Journal:

About 20% of the respondents in a 2007 survey of 18,000 people said that they had put off or gone without needed medical treatment at some point in the year earlier, up from 14% in a 2003 survey. That jump came after relative stability in patients' access to care from 1997 to 2003.

Obviously as costs increase and patients are forced to pay a greater percentage of their care, this result was inevitable. The question is, how "necessary" is necessary and is this trend necessarily a bad thing? After all, while there are certainly "cut-and-dry" cases when immediate treatment is a must, one's definition of "needed" changes dramatically based on who is paying for the care.