New statistics reveal more Americans struggling to pay their medical bills

The percentage of Americans who can afford prescription drugs and quality health care is at an all-time low of 55%, down six points since 2022, according to the West Health Gallup Healthcare Affordability Index. The index was developed in 2021 to track the share of Americans who say they avoided health care or missed a prescription drug in the past three months, and whether they believe they would be able to get health care if they needed it today.

The drop is driven primarily by two groups: adults ages 50-64 (down 8 points to 55%) and adults over 65 (down 8 points to 71%), a worrying sign since Medicare eligibility for most Americans begins at age 65. The share of adults under 50 who can easily afford their health care costs is 47%, the lowest of all age groups, down 5 points since 2022.

For this index, researchers classified Americans into one of three categories depending on how easy or difficult they reported it was to pay for and access health care, including prescription drugs.

• Stable Costs – No recent issues with cost or availability of medical care or prescriptions.
• Cost anxiety – Recent inability to pay for or access care or medications.
• I am in desperate need of money and these days I can’t afford the medical fees and medicines and I can’t get quality treatment right away.

“After rising in 2022, America’s affordability of health care is trending in the wrong direction,” said Timothy Rush, president of West Health, a nonprofit focused on aging and health care research, policy and philanthropy. “The good news is that health care provisions in the Control Inflation Act, which have yet to take effect, such as giving Medicare the power to negotiate lower drug prices, could slow these negative trends and bring more stability. But more needs to be done to contain prices for Americans of all ages. Rising prices are one of the biggest obstacles to a healthy aging population and a thriving economy.”

Forty-five percent of U.S. adults report having trouble paying for health care, being cost anxious or cost anxious. Younger adults are more than three times as likely to be cost anxious than those 65 and older (10% vs. 3%). The share of people ages 50 to 64 who are cost anxious has risen to 10%, the highest level ever measured for this group. Racial and gender disparities are also widening, with Black (11%) and Hispanic (14%) adults significantly more likely than white adults (7%) to fall into the cost anxious category, and women (11%) are nearly twice as likely as men (6%).

According to the recently released WestHealth-Gallup 2024 American Aging Survey, an estimated 72.2 million U.S. adults, or nearly one in three, have not sought necessary medical care in the past three months due to cost concerns. This includes an estimated 8.1 million Americans age 65 or older. Nearly one-third (31%) are concerned about their ability to pay for prescription drugs in the next 12 months, up from 25% in 2022.

“2022 saw encouraging trends in easing health care costs in the wake of the pandemic,” said Dan Witters, a Gallup senior researcher. “The decline in 2024 is concerning because it signals the fragility of Americans’ purchasing power in a costly health care system. In a relatively short period of time, many adults have gone from feeling confident they could afford health care costs to struggling to afford them.”

In addition to the affordability index, in 2021 the West Health Gallup Healthcare Value Index was developed to track public opinion on the perceived value of the health care Americans receive compared to what they pay for it. The index shows one of the few slightly positive trends: More than one-third (36%) of Americans in 2024 believe they (and Americans in general) pay too much for the quality of care they receive and that their most recent health care experience was not worth the cost, which is 9 percentage points lower than the number reported three years ago.

methodology

The results are based on a survey conducted as part of the Gallup Panel from November 13, 2023 to January 8, 2024, among 5,149 adults ages 18 and older living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, both by mail (with an emphasis on older adults) and via the web.

For results based on monthly samples of national adults, the margin of sampling error at the 95% confidence level, including design effects, is ±1.7 percentage points for response rates of about 50%, and ±1 percentage point for response rates of about 10% or 90%. For reported age subgroups, the margin of error is larger, typically in the range of ±3 to ±5 percentage points.

Courtesy of West Health Research Institute