A new study says that the population of mothers in the United States is currently experiencing an unexpected conundrum. Based on the research, over 50 percent of the latest and expectant mothers in the country are having a challenge regarding the collective bills they pay.
Motherhood and Finance
University of Michigan's Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation, and Program on Women's Healthcare Effectiveness Research PWHER expert Michelle Moniz said in a Florida News Times report that the population of pregnant and postpartum women is having issues on their financial status today.
A recent study authored by Moniz and other colleagues found that one in four women intentionally avoided going to a medical expert for a check-up and health evaluation due to the expensive cost of care. Based on the data, 60 percent of the mothers said that the healthcare payments are unaffordable for them, and 54 percent of the group stated that they skipped the visits due to general financial stress. The study was analyzed from the information gathered from 2013 to 2018 with the help of pregnant newly pregnant individuals by the US National Health Interview Survey. The survey was conducted during the economy's surge alongside the approval of law over better healthcare access called the Affordable Care Act.
According to the research, mothers that are part of a low-income household are more exposed to the challenges of financial issues and billing debts. Newly pregnant women who do not possess any healthcare insurance tend to not meet the healthcare needs linked to pregnancy. On the other hand, women that possess private insurance tend to believe that the cost of their health care is too much for their pockets.
Healthcare Cost is Unaffordable for Mothers, Regardless of Financial Status
The most bizarre finding from the research is that most women in the insured group have a whopping amount of healthcare costs taken straight out of their personal budgets. The out-of-pocket costs included additional payments for deductibles and co-insurance connected to either pregnancy or childbirth care. Moniz emphasized in a MedicalXpress report that the results from the study are huge and obvious signals for materializing a better policy that could ease the financial inflictions and dissolve the long-debated financial segregation of health care access relayed to the families and parents that are privately insured.
The same argument on high-cost healthcare was also presented by the majority of the families in lower-income households. Moniz said that these family groups are having a hard time paying out-of-pocket costs and other additional costs, such as transportation and childcare, due to its chunk of shares out of the family's total income. The expert added that to solve the issue, one potential approach is to develop sliding-scale deductibles that could balance and specialize healthcare costs towards pregnant and postpartum women relative to their economic status. The study was published in the journal Health Policy, titled "Financial Hardship Among Pregnant and Postpartum Women in the United States, 2013 to 2018."
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