More Than 10 Percent of Adults Missed Health Care in Spring 2021

Eleven percent of nonelderly adults and 9.2 percent of parents (on behalf of their children) report delaying or forgoing health care in the past 30 days due to concerns about coronavirus exposure, according to two reports published by the Urban Institute and funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Dulce Gonzalez, from the Urban Institute, and colleagues reviewed data from the April 2021 Health Reform Monitoring Survey to assess how many adults went without needed health care during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors found that 11.0 percent of nonelderly adults (aged 18 to 64 years) reported delaying or forgoing at least one type of care in the previous 30 days over concerns about exposure to the coronavirus; 6.3 percent had an unmet need for multiple types of care.

In a second report, Gonzalez and colleagues used data from the April 2021 Health Reform Monitoring Survey to examine how many parents report delaying or forgoing care for their children for fear of coronavirus exposure. The authors found that 9.2 percent of parents aged 18 to 64 years reported delaying or forgoing at least one type of care for their children in the previous 30 days; 5.5 percent reported that their children had missed out on multiple types of care. The most common type of delayed or forgone care was dental care (5.3 percent).

"Even as COVID-19 cases fell from their peak, delayed and forgone health care over worries about exposure to coronavirus persisted in April 2021," Gonzalez said in a statement. "Unmet health care needs can adversely affect health and other daily activities for both children and adults."