More Americans are having an Easier Time Paying Medical Bills, Study Says

Paying medical bills has gotten easier for more Americans, a new federal study reported.

For this report, experts at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) examined statistics gathered from the National Health Interview Survey, which took place from January 2011 to June 2015. They found that 16.5 percent of Americans under the age of 65 - or 44.5 million Americans - reported having difficulties paying their medical bills for the first six months in 2015. This rate is lower than the rate calculated in 2011, which was at around 21 percent (56.5 million).

The CDC reported specifically that more families with younger children were able to pay their medical bills in the first half of 2015. The percentage of families with children younger than 17 who had trouble paying for medical bills fell from 23 percent in 2011 to 18 percent in 2015.

The experts were not surprised to find that poorer families reported more difficulties with their bills. In 2015, 25 percent of the people who were younger than 65 and were in poor or near-poor families have problems paying their bills over the past 12 months. In the group of people who were not considered poor or near-poor, 12 percent of them under 65 reported having payment issues

The researchers added that health care affected affordability. In the first half of 2015, 30 percent of Americans under 65 who did not have insurance were from families that reported having problems paying their bills over the past 12 months. In people with public insurance, 22 percent were in families that had payment trouble. For the private insurance group, only 12 percent fell in the category of having money issues.

For more information, read the report here.