Women Likelier to Forgo Health Care, Citing Costs

U.S. women with health insurance are more likely than men to go without needed care because of higher premiums and related costs, a study said. A larger percentage of women also have trouble paying their medical bills.

More women didn't fill prescriptions, skipped recommended visits with specialists, failed to get tests, or just didn't seek treatment when they had a medical problem, according to a national survey by the Commonwealth Fund, a private, New York- based group that supports research on health and social issues.

Other studies have suggested that women often pay more for care because they need more routine exams, such as those related to pregnancy. These issues should be part of the national debate as employers switch to plans with higher deductibles and policy makers seek flexible, lower-cost options for 44 million uninsured and 16 million ``underinsured'' adults, the report said.

Politicians and advocates ``should ensure that any proposal provides comprehensive benefits and low cost-sharing,'' said Judith Waxman, vice president of the National Women's Law Center, in a statement yesterday. Waxman co-wrote the report with Elizabeth Patchias, a health policy analyst at the center, in Washington.

Less Money, Higher Expenses

More than 4,000 adults ages 19 and older participated in the survey, researchers said. Of that number, 33 percent of insured women and 68 percent of uninsured didn't get the health care they needed because they couldn't afford it, compared with 23 percent of insured men and 49 percent of uninsured men who went without care.

Among full-time workers, women earn 77 cents for every dollar men earn, according to the most recent Labor Department figures.

``The combination of lower incomes and higher out-of-pocket spending means that many women are more likely to spend greater than 10 percent of their income on health-care expenditures and premiums,'' Patchias and Waxman wrote in the report.

Almost 38 percent of all women surveyed reported difficulty paying medical bills, compared with 29 percent of men, the report said. Among the insured, 31 percent of women had trouble with bills compared with 22 percent of men. About a quarter of the women said they weren't able to pay their bills at all, and about the same percentage said they're paying them off over time.

A separate study by Harvard Medical School researchers earlier this month said high-deductible or so-called ``consumer- driven'' plans hurt women. The authors said the median expense for men under 45 in the plans was less than $500, while women typically paid more than $1,200.

About a third of insured men in that age group spent more than $1,050 in yearly medical costs, while 55 percent of women had out-of-pocket costs at the same level.

Preventive Care Included

Some benefits providers have challenged the researchers' assumptions about consumer-driven plans, saying that a number cover preventive care for women or other costs. They also say the plans, which can have deductibles of $1,000 or more for employee- only coverage, offer spending flexibility to the women who choose them.

``One of the advantages I've seen is that these women now have more freedom to seek out alternative forms of care instead of being stuck in a traditional form, where what the doctor says goes,'' said Robert Hurley, vice president of strategic initiatives at eHealth Inc., a seller of health insurance on the Internet, based in Mountain View, California.

For now, enrollment in the plans remains low because of confusion about them and consumer wariness about care limits present in some plans when they were first introduced, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a Washington-based group that focuses on economic security issues.

Insufficient Information

Initial data on the plans suggests that those currently using them are more cost-conscious, the institute said in a December report. The institute found that many of those surveyed weren't satisfied with the quality of information the plans provided to help them make informed decisions about their care.

Insurance companies ``need to do a better job'' of packaging their plans so people can quickly see and understand the pluses and minuses of each, e-Health's Hurley said in a phone interview yesterday. He added that more research is needed to determine whether women are buying higher levels of deductibles than men.

As of 2005, 247 million people in the U.S. had some kind of public or private health coverage, according to the Census Bureau.

source:www.bloomberg.com