White males report highest levels of health care security – again

For a decade and a half, true health coverage for all has been a national objective in the U.S. Yet affordable health insurance that people can actually use to maintain or improve their health remains primarily a white male reality.

A recent report on Americans and health insurance from the Kaiser Family Foundation confirms that this is still the case in the U.S.

The report touched on all the major components of access to and the ability to afford health care: postponed treatment; unfilled prescriptions; accumulated debt due to medical bills; general concern about paying for medical care; inability to pay for an unanticipated $500 medical bill. In nearly every category, white males report having fewer concerns about paying for medical care, and about adhering to recommended treatments.

Apart from the gender/race imbalance found in the report, the relatively high incidence of all U.S. adults having fears and concerns about their health care and health insurance was troubling. Consider:

• Half of U.S. adults say they have difficulty affording health care costs, and about 4 in 10 U.S. adults say they have delayed or gone without medical care in the last year due to cost. (Dental care was most commonly cited.)
• About a quarter of adults say they or their family member have not filled a prescription, cut pills in half, or skipped doses of medicine in the last year because of the cost.
• High health care costs disproportionately affect uninsured adults, Black and Hispanic adults, and those with lower incomes. Larger shares of U.S. adults in each of these groups report difficulty affording various types of care and delaying or forgoing medical care due to the cost.
• About one-third of insured adults worry about affording their monthly health insurance premium, and 44% worry about affording their deductible before health insurance kicks in.
• About 4 in 10 adults (41%) report having debt due to medical or dental bills including debts owed to credit cards, collections agencies, family and friends, banks, and other lenders to pay for their health care costs.

Equally troubling is the gender/race gap.

Asked whether medical bills have caused them to accumulate debt, a “disproportionate share of Black and Hispanic adults, women” say they were struggling to pay off medical debt. Asked whether they or a family member had not filled a prescription due to the cost, Blacks, Hispanics, and women again report more often than white males that they had. Just 26% of males (most of them white) say yes to that one.

Related: 100 million people in U.S. saddled with health care debt

The largest gender/race gap appeared when adults were asked if they could pay full freight for an unexpected $500 medical bill. Just 13% of whites say there was no way they could pay the bill, compared to 25% of Hispanics and 37% of Blacks. On the gender breakdown, 12% of men say they couldn’t pay it, compared to 23% of women.

In answer to the big picture question – Is it difficult for you to afford healthcare costs?–less than half say it is. But 61% of whites say it is no big problem, while 60% of Blacks and 65% of Hispanics say it was very or somewhat difficult.