30% of Seniors Still Experience Impacts of Foregone, Delayed Care

Senior members might continue to see canceled or delayed care even as coronavirus cases decline, a trend which has had significant impacts on payer revenues and spending in 2020 and 2021, a report from the University of Michigan’s National Poll on Healthy Aging found.

Nearly three out of ten adults over 50 (28 percent) delayed care due to the coronavirus pandemic in 2021.

“Whether they chose to postpone or their provider did, these patients missed opportunities for preventive care and for early detection and effective management of chronic conditions, not to mention operations and procedures to address a pressing health need,” said Jeffrey Kullgren, MD, associate director of the poll and a health care researcher and associate professor of internal medicine at Michigan Medicine in the University of Michigan’s academic medical center.

The National Poll on Healthy Aging surveyed 1,011 adults ages 50 and older in late January 2022. Seniors could complete the survey by phone or online.

In the past year alone, 14 percent of the poll participants said that they had decided to delay, reschedule, or forego care. Eight percent of the respondents said their providers had canceled, delayed, or rescheduled their care. Twenty-eight percent of seniors who had an appointment scheduled in 2021 had their care canceled, delayed, or rescheduled due to COVID-19.

By January 2022, only a little more than a third of individuals who had to reschedule or delay care had received the care (34 percent). Another four out of ten individuals had rescheduled it (38 percent). Of the remaining respondents, 16 percent had planned to reschedule their appointments but had yet to do so, and 10 percent planned to forego their appointments.

When the researchers homed in on primary care trends among older adults, they found that, in 2021, almost three out of ten seniors (29 percent) saw their primary care appointments disrupted due to the pandemic.

Fifteen percent of seniors had delayed, rescheduled, or foregone a primary care appointment due to the pandemic. A little more than one in ten respondents indicated that their providers had changed the appointment status due to the pandemic.

Although the rate of rescheduling appointments overall was fairly low, more than half of seniors who had experienced a disruption to their primary care appointments reported that they had already received the disrupted care by early 2022 (56 percent). One-fifth of the respondents had rescheduled their appointments. 

But 14 percent of respondents had not rescheduled their primary care appointments yet, and eight percent did not plan to do so.

Delayed or foregone care was particularly prevalent among unvaccinated seniors. The poll showed that 44 percent of unvaccinated seniors had rescheduled their disrupted appointments. Meanwhile, eight out of ten fully vaccinated individuals, including their booster shots, had rescheduled their disrupted procedures.

In primary care specifically, 53 percent of unvaccinated people had rescheduled an appointment. Although this represents more than half of the unvaccinated population that experienced a primary care disruption, it pales in comparison to the 85 percent of fully vaccinated seniors who have rescheduled their primary care appointments.

“The fact that half or more unvaccinated people have not yet rescheduled those disrupted appointments is especially concerning, because every encounter with a health care provider is also an opportunity to talk about the benefits and safety of COVID vaccination for older adults,” Kullgren added.

In May 2020, nearly 50 percent of Americans had postponed care or had a family member who had deferred care because of COVID-19. At the time, most of those individuals intended to reschedule their deferred appointments for the next couple of months.

These delays in care had considerable impacts on payers’ premiums. Deferred care trends continue to influence payer spending and revenue in 2022.