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However, the age group most struggling to afford health care is adults under 50—with 53 percent unable to cover their bills, down five points from 2022.
“The good news is that health care provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act—including empowering Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices, which has not yet taken effect—may help slow these negative trends and provide more stability.”
Each participant was grouped into one of three categories based on their reported ease in accessing and paying for medical care, prescription drugs included.
The findings follow those of the recently released West Health–Gallup Survey on Aging in America, which reported that one-in-three Americans—some 72.2 million people—have avoided seeking out health care in the last quarter due to cost.
“The year 2022 showed encouraging trends of increased health care affordability, post-pandemic,” said Gallup senior researcher Dan Witters.
"The decline in 2024 is concerning in that it shows the fragility of American’s purchasing power amid a high-priced health care system.
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The US healthcare system is completely broken unless you’re rich.
Multiple things can be true at the same time, though: people don’t take care of themselves and live very unhealthy sedentary lifestyles with awful diets.
Unfortunately people don’t take care of themselves because it’s expensive too. Most people who don’t have a lot of money also don’t have a lot of time to prepare food from whole food sources, so they go for inexpensive pre prepared foods, which are awful for you.
Exercise is possible but again requires a lot of time (and energy) that you likely don’t have if you’re working two 35 hour a week food service jobs (or one, honestly). On top of that the built environment is so hostile to being outside of a car, that the easy free exercise choice of walking places is entirely or effectively impossible in most places.
All that is to say I don’t think the blame is on individuals (not that you really said that) for not choosing the healthy options, it’s on our society for focusing on work, convenience, and efficiency at the expense of health. Just like everything else here, it’s going to be a real challenge to fix because it’s to tied into everything else, but I hope we can tackle it.
