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More Americans Struggle With Health Care Costs
TUESDAY, Dec. 12/2006 (HealthDay) More Americans are forced to spend more of their family income on health care, and more middle-class Americans are joining the ranks of those spending a disproportionate share of their budget on such expenses, a new study finds.
An estimated 50 million Americans under the age of 65 live in families that spend more than 10 percent of their family income on health care, an increase of more than 10 million people over the past decade.
"We know health-care costs are rising, we know premiums are rising to reflect greater health-care costs, but we didn't know how they're actually affecting family's budgets," said study co-author Jessica Banthin.
"There's been a large increase in the number of people living with these kinds of financial burdens," added Banthin, director of the division of modeling and simulation at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Carol Pryor, a senior policy analyst at The Access Project in Boston, which works with local communities to improve health and health-care access, said, "This reinforces findings that have been accumulating about the increasing amount of medical debt and the financial burden that goes along with it. We can be sure some expenses are turning into debt. This has access consequences as well as serious financial consequences, such as using up savings or not being able to pay for food or utilities."
Health-care costs have been outpacing the rest of the U.S. economy for years.
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