The Highest Cost of Health
According to research to be presented on Sunday, May 2, at the Pediatric Academic Societies (PAS) annual meeting in Denver noted that the high cost of health care makes parents not bring their children to the doctor or buy prescription drugs because they do not have health insurance.
In previous studies, families who have difficulty paying medical bills or forget to delay the necessary treatment. In this case, the factors that affect the family’s decision ‘to delay care is health care costs relative to family income and have children with physical limitations, social, behavioral or cognitive, such as asthma, autism or obese. Delayed treatment was defined as delay or goes without medical care or prescription drugs for the elderly or children because of cost and / or related insurance reasons.
The results showed that the excessive financial burden, having a child with ongoing activity limitation and parents who have insurance intermittent all increase the likelihood of families will delay treatment. However, when parents and children have the same insurance, they will get the necessary treatment.
Families whose income is less than 100 percent of federal poverty level are more likely to delay care than families with incomes above 400 percent of poverty level. This indicates that poor families do not choose to spend their money to go to the doctor when a person is sick because the price is too expensive to be healthy.
Wisk said that the public policies that reduce the financial burden and provide insurance for the family as a unit rather than individuals, such as Badger Care in Wisconsin, allowing families to get the care they need and when families are insured, they still bear some of the burden of health care costs (through premiums, deductibles, co-pays, etc.), then when the cost exceeds a certain limit as compared to income of a family, they will delay or forget about health care. Wisk also said that if people do not get the care they need, they will be more pain as a result.