Health Care in America: Your Money or Your Life

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It May Be That Our Priorities Are Sick

You’ll probably read or hear about the research conducted by a team led by Jeffrey Peipert, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Washington University Medical School, because it had to do with birth control, abortion and American women, some of them young. Any two of those three topics in one conversation can provide all the makings of a good argument, and here we have the entire trifecta. So, Peipert’s study will get its share of media attention.

My slant on the story’s hot button elements, however, is that they are just aspects of a much larger and graver concern. But here, let’s get the basics of the study out of the way. The research, which ran from 2007 to 2011, involved over 9,000 women aged 14 to 45 living in the St. Louis area. What they had in common was a desire not to get pregnant for at least a year. They were given counseling as to the most effective methods — that either IUDs or hormonal implants are superior to the pill, condoms and other options — and told that whatever they chose would be supplied to them for free.

The study produced some interesting and provocative numbers, mostly having to do with a decrease in the rates of teen pregnancies, abortions in general, and so on, but the one that caught my eye was the contraception method breakdown. Fully 75 percent of the women opted for either the IUD (58 percent) or the implants (17 percent). This somewhat floored the researchers, since among women nationwide, only 9 percent employ those methods.

The assumption had been that women avoided the two best methods because they involved doctors and clinical procedures and bodily insertion and awkwardness. What the study found was that women avoided the two best methods because they were far and away the costliest, thanks to the need for doctors and clinical procedures and so on. Awkwardness? Feh. To quote Peipert: “When cost is not an issue, what is really important to women is that a method work well.”

Personally, I think that Peipert’s conclusion could be more accurately worded. To wit: “What is really important to women is that a method work well, period. Cost, even if prohibitive, does not change that fact, it merely influences a woman’s ability to use that method.” In fact, you can put it in even more basic and fundamental terms. “What is really important to people in need of medical care is that they get it, not how they pay for it.”

And yet, that principle has been turned on its head in America. I keep running across studies or news items about people for whom their own physical health is given a lower priority than financial considerations. Here are just a couple.

• A survey by Hill & Knowlton Strategies found that some one-third of Americans say that they passed up a regular checkup or medical treatment that they needed due to the cost. More than one in four said that the most important factor when making a decision regarding health care was the expense involved.
• It’s vital that cancer patients who have been successfully treated get regular medical workups to detect any long-term health problems linked to their treatment, but a University of Utah study of young cancer survivors in the 15-to-34 age range found that they were actually more inclined to forgo medical checkups due to cost than a cancer-free control group. This reluctance even extended to survivors who had health insurance. Especially put off by the sheer cost were survivors who were ages 20 to 29, and/or female, two groups most unlikely to have employee health benefits. Many of these people have come close enough to death to smell it, but their primary concern is nonetheless financial.

We could go on like this until you dozed off; Google “expensive medical care” and you get just under 43 million results, a lot of them having to do with people doing without. That many people simply haven’t the money to pay for needed medical care is nothing new. What bothers me is the growing sense that even for people who could afford such care, money has become more important to us than our own well being, instead of a means of achieving that well being. You expect the attitude that money matters more than health from the tobacco and sugar industries, but not from the person in the mirror.

Of course, lowering the cost of medical care would be the most direct way to resolve our money-or-life dilemma, but how to do that without antagonizing about half the U.S. electorate one way or the other is the question du jour. I’ll stop here before I get partisan, but I leave you with one note. Remember our opening item about the cost of contraception? Free birth control for women is now becoming more widely and easily available under a provision of Obamacare.

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News):

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Health Care in America: Your Money or Your Life is a post from: CalorieLab - Health News & Information Blog

Source: http://calorielab.com/news/2012/10/10/health-care-in-america-your-money-or-your-life/

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