Financial Distress Connected To Medical Bills Shows A Decline, The First In Years
After rising for a decade, the number of Americans experiencing financial distress from their medical bills has started to decline, a new survey has found.
The result provides new evidence that the Affordable Care Act, by providing uninsured people with health insurance, is also improving their financial security, a major goal of the law.
The large telephone survey, from the New York-based health research group the Commonwealth Fund, has been asking people about their medical bills every few years for a decade. In each survey through 2012, a higher percentage of Americans said they struggled to pay their medical bills, were paying off medical debt or had been contacted by a collection agency. The most recent installment of the survey, the first since the health law’s major provisions kicked in, shows a reversal in that trend.
The survey also found that fewer people were avoiding doctors’ visits because of concerns about cost.
“Health insurance really provides people with a financial means to get care,” said Sara Collins, a vice president at Commonwealth, who worked on the study. “We don’t know yet that the law is improving people’s health, but this is a first indication that people are affording care that they weren’t able to get in the past.”
The cost of medical care remains a financial hardship for many Americans. According to the survey, the percentage of Amlast year declined from a high of 41 percent in 2012 to 35 percent in 2014. But that still means more than a third of all Americans struggle to afford the cost of their medical care. The high rate of problems with medical debt was the subject of a recent study from the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which estimated that more than a fifth of Americans have medical debt on their credit reports. Medical debt has been found to be a leading cause of personal bankruptcies.
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Financial distress was a clear target of the health law, which sought to make health care more accessible and more affordable.
The survey also found that about 43 percent of Americans had avoided some sort of medical care in 2012 because of concerns about the cost. That rate fell in 2014 to 36 percent.
The reductions in problems with medical bills and debt mostly reflect the increases in the number of Americans with insurance, Ms. Collins said. The addition of health insurance means that people who in the past had no help paying medical bills now have new financing for doctors’ visits, prescription drugs and hospital stays. (Paradoxically, people who lack insurance often face the highest prices for such services, meaning they have less financial assistance and pay more than insured customers.)
But Commonwealth also found that, over all, even people who had insurance before 2014 were having fewer problems with medical bills than they were before. That change may reflect rules in the health law that require individual insurance plans to cover a minimum set of benefits for every customer.
There is another trend cutting against those improving financial protections for individuals. Employers are increasingly asking their workers to pay deductibles and other fees when they seek health care, and several recent surveys have shown that the average size of those deductibles and fees is rising. A recent national poll from The New York Times and CBS News found that 33 percent of people said that their out-of-pocket costs had “gone up a lot.”
The Commonwealth survey suggests that, in the last two years, the benefits for some people have outweighed the difficulties for others.
