A study has attempted to link the amount of medical debt to just how much sicker those individuals are, determining that a 1% increase in a population with medical debt yields 18.3 more physically unhealthy days and 17.9 additional mentally unhealthy days in the past 30 days per 1,000 people.
The study was published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
To make its determinations, researchers looked at county-by-county medical debt data from the Urban Institute Debt in America project, which was linked with data on self-reported health status and premature deaths from the County Health Rankings & Roadmaps and mortality date from the National Center for Health Statistics. The study looked at 2,943 different counties across the country.
All leading causes of death — cancer, heart disease, and suicide — were higher in counties where there were larger medical debt burdens, according to the report. Many surveys have indicated that individuals with medical debt choose to forego visits to the doctor, when they are well or sick, and this data proves that choice to not go is costing people their lives.
“These findings suggest that medical debt is associated with worse health status, more premature deaths, and higher mortality rates at the county level in the U.S.,” the researchers concluded.
On average, an individual experienced 4.4 physically unhealthy days and 4.7 mentally unhealthy days during the last 30 days. When factoring in medical debt, the number of physical and mental unhealthy days increases, according to the report. For every $100 increase in the amount of average medical debt in a given county, there were eight more physically unhealthy days and 6.7 more mentally unhealthy days per 1,000 people.
