Foreshadowing: Women *are* cutting back on healthcare due to cost

In the pre-Thanksgiving blog post where I encouraged you to talk about health with your family (you did, right?) I theorized

I suspect with our current economic climate even more moms will choose health care for their children first and postpone their own due to the expense.

Little did I know that there was a survey in progress by the National Women's Health Resource Center (NWHRC, at healthywomen.org) about this very topic that was released yesterday with some sobering news about women and healthcare.

• 45% of the women have failed to seek medical care in the past year (including doctor's visits, recommended medical procedures & medications) because the cost was too high, with Hispanic women more likely (58%) than white (43%) or African-American (42%) women.
  
  
• More than 40% reported their health had declined over the past 5 years, mostly due to stress and weight gain.
  
  
• Only 42% mentioned feeling prepared to grow older in terms of financial security, with financial (51%), retirement (46%), medical (42%) and health insurance options (41%) given as information needs.

On the positive side, women feel more positive about aging and named Tina Turner as the celebrity over age 50 that they admired most. Rock on!

NWHRC has created an online wellness information resource for women in response to the findings of the survey. At a quick glance I'm finding a few broken links in this consumer health resource, but I definitely encourage checking out De-stress the Holidays. It's a bit too late for all the long range planning tips (10 weeks) but there are gems in there that could still be done such as "If certain rituals trigger sadness, change them or create new traditions to replace them."