Our favorite healthcare provider, a husband-and-wife team practicing Chinese medicine, informed us last week that the clinic we’ve been visiting for years was closing for good. Shuttered first by the state’s pandemic lockdown and then destroyed with a fire during the riots following George Floyd’s death, this unconventional neighborhood infirmary had no chance of recovery.
While mourning the loss of a trusted practitioner, My Lovely Wife and that i recognize that we’re among the more fortunate in our geezer counterparts across the country. Gainfully employed as well as in reasonably good health, we may eventually seek out another provider; for millions of other folks, though, COVID-19 has seriously disrupted use of healthcare.
A recent survey discovered that three out of four Americans have postponed or canceled doctor appointments, now use online consultations, stockpiled prescriptions, or rationed medications because of the pandemic. Part of the mindset change comes from the understandable fear of contracting the virus in a doctor’s office and public-health orders limiting elective medical procedures, but it’s also a product from the historic economic downturn. For the multitudes unemployed and uninsured, a clinic visit is simply unaffordable.
The results of the April poll, published last week by a GoodRx research team, showed that 65 percent of respondents canceled or rescheduled a physician appointment due to COVID-19 and 27 percent opted for a virtual consultation. A little more than half of those surveyed reported concerns about accessing medication. And, as you may expect, it’s low-income workers who've been hit the hardest: Those earning under $20,000 a year comprised just 16 percent of the respondents but accounted for 28 percent of those that had lost their healthcare coverage.
“Within two months, the coronavirus pandemic has upended the way many Americans access, use, and pay for healthcare,” GoodRx health economist Amanda Nguyen, PhD, writes. “These disruptions to healthcare use, medication supply, and insurance coverage will likely have a lasting impact on patient health and the healthcare system at large.”
An earlier survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation reported that in regards to a third of those respondents who had delayed seeking healthcare because the pandemic struck planned to wait more than three months before considering a trip to their doctor — or simply still put it off.
Writing in the New York Times, Reed Abelson describes the conundrum Thomas Chapman faced after he was let go from his job as a sales director. Though he suffers from hypertension and diabetes, the 64-year-old Chapman chose not to refill his prescriptions for two months. “I stopped taking everything after i just couldn’t pay anymore,” he says.
With his legs swelling and lethargy setting in, Chapman finally asked his doctor and pharmacist about less expensive alternatives, but without insurance his choices are limited until he qualifies for Medicare.
In hard-hit areas like Nyc, the trend to delay care became clear in early stages. People suffering from acute conditions, including cardiac arrest and serious fractures, simply refused to travel to the ER. “It was as if they disappeared, but they didn’t disappear,” Jack Choueka, chair of orthopedics at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, tells Abelson. “People were dying [at] home; they just weren’t coming into the hospital.”
I certainly comprehend the impulse to avoid hospitals — and doctor’s offices. Well before the pandemic struck, MLW and that i stayed clear of the medical-pharmaceutical complex, despite my Medicare coverage and my employer’s generous healthcare plan. So, unlike so many of our elderly cohort, we’ll muddle through this moment without needing to face any harsh repercussions. We won’t be visiting our “doctor” anymore, but we’ll continue doing what we can to remain upright and ambulatory. Hopefully, we — and those facing more challenges than us — will get to the other side of the pandemic more or less intact.
