AEGiS-WSJ: Americans Cut Back on Health Care In 2001 From 1997, Mainly for Costs

Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2002. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Americans Cut Back on Health Care In 2001 From 1997, Mainly for Costs

Wall Street Journal - March 22, 2002
Jill Carroll, Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

WASHINGTON -- Americans' access to health care didn't improve during the recent years when the economy was strong, and rising medical costs bear most of blame, a new study has found.

The report, by the Washington-based Center for Studying Health System Change, said that about 15% of Americans either didn't seek or delayed receiving medical care they needed for various reasons from 1997 to 2001 -- and the biggest reason was cost. The percentage of people who didn't receive needed health care even rose slightly during the peak of the economic boom: 5.8% didn't get needed care in 2001, up from 5.2% in 1997.

The percentage of people who delayed treatment in that time stayed about the same.

"This failure to improve people's access to health care during such good economic times is a bad omen," said Paul Ginsburg, president of the center.

Children were the exception to the overall trend. About 5.1% of children didn't get the medical care they needed or delayed it in 2001, while 6.3% did so in 1997. The improvement is attributed mainly to a state health-insurance program for children that was passed by Congress in 1997.

While the report, funded by the nonpartisan, philanthropic Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, shied away from advocating a solution to these problems, it did note steps being considered by policy makers that might help, such as providing tax credits to encourage expansion of health-care coverage and building more federally funded community health centers.

Not surprisingly, the report found that many of the people who didn't seek the care they needed were poor or uninsured. Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a patient advocacy group, noted that the report stopped in mid-2001, before many jobs were cut in the recent downturn, worsening the "epidemic" of uninsured people.

The report was a compilation of data from three surveys of a total of about 60,000 people from 1997 to 2001 performed by the center.

It comes on the heels of another health-care study by the Institute of Medicine that found minorities received inferior health care, compared with whites, even when they both were the same age and had the same insurance coverage, income or severity of disease.

That study found minorities were less likely to get the appropriate heart medications, cancer diagnosis and advanced treatments for HIV, among other disparities. The IOM study attributed the disparities in part to prejudice and stereotyping in the medical system and a lack of doctors in minority communities. Also part of the reason was that minorities tended to have less expensive insurance that didn't cover as many services, compared with whites, the study said.

Write to Jill Carroll at jill.carroll@wsj.com
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WJ020307

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