Skip to main content

Medical Debt Tied to Higher Likelihood of Forgone Mental Health Care

Medically reviewed by Carmen Pope, BPharm. Last updated on April 25, 2025.

By Lori Solomon HealthDay Reporter

FRIDAY, April 25, 2025 -- More than one in seven adults reported carrying medical debt in 2023, and of these, one in three forwent mental health care in the subsequent year, according to a research letter published online April 18 in JAMA Health Forum.

Kyle J. Moon, from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, and colleagues evaluated the association between medical debt and forgone mental health care due to cost in the subsequent year. The analysis included data from 1,821 adults surveyed in 2023 through 2024 as part of the COVID-19 Life Stressors Impact on Mental Health and Well-Being study.

The researchers found that forgone mental health care was significantly higher among adults with past-year medical debt (33.8 versus 6.3 percent weighted). There was an association between any medical debt and an increase of 17.3 percentage points in the probability of forgone mental health care due to cost. There was an increase in the probability of unmet mental health care needs with increasing medical debt.

"While there are a constellation of factors leading to unmet needs for mental health care, medical debt is an iatrogenic problem that leaves patients grappling with the decision to pay large out-of-pocket costs, accumulate medical debt, or forgo needed care," the authors write. "Several policy efforts to address medical debt are underway, and there remains an urgent need to understand how these interventions protect against medical debt and if such protections can aid in addressing unmet needs for mental health care."

Abstract/Full Text

Disclaimer: Statistical data in medical articles provide general trends and do not pertain to individuals. Individual factors can vary greatly. Always seek personalized medical advice for individual healthcare decisions.

© 2025 HealthDay. All rights reserved.

Posted April 2025

Read this next

Low Alcohol Use Disorder Treatment Rates Seen in Cancer Survivors

THURSDAY, May 29, 2025 -- For U.S. adult cancer survivors with a new alcohol use disorder (AUD) diagnosis, the one-year cumulative incidence of AUD treatment initiation was 14.3...

Considerable Decline Seen in Self-Reported Maternal Mental Health

THURSDAY, May 29, 2025 -- From 2016 to 2023, there was a considerable decline in self-reported maternal mental health, while declines in physical health were smaller, according to...

Total Number of Excess Deaths >14.7 Million in U.S. in 1980 to 2023

THURSDAY, May 29, 2025 -- There were 14,735,913 excess deaths in the United States during 1980 to 2023 compared with other high-income countries (HICs), according to a research...

More news resources

Subscribe to our newsletter

Whatever your topic of interest, subscribe to our newsletters to get the best of Drugs.com in your inbox.