Many Millennials Are Neglecting Health Concerns: Harmony
Harmony Healthcare IT found 47% have been trying to ignore an issue for at least six months.
Harmony Healthcare IT has asked millennials about a matter of keen interest to life and disability insurers: How many have health issues doctors don’t know about.
The South Bend, Indiana-based medical record data management company recently surveyed 2,040 U.S. adults ages 23 through 39 to find out how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting young adults’ use of health care.
About 43% of the survey participants said they had been ignoring a health issue.
Here’s a breakdown of how long the participants with unaddressed health issues said they had been ignoring the issues:
- Three Months or Less: 35%
- Three to Six Months: 18%
- Six Months to One Year: 14%
- Longer Than One Year: 33%
Harmony did not ask the survey participants about the nature of their complaints.
The company learned about the extent of millennials’ secret health issues when it asked those who had not had checkups in the COVID-19 era their reasons for avoiding the doctor.
About 50% cited COVID-19-related safety concerns.
Most of the rest listed concerns such as, “I feel healthy,” and “Inconvenient.”
But 13% said they avoid checkups because they’re “worried I’ll have a serious health issue.”
Harmony also found that 69% of the participants say they search Google for health advice, rather than going to a doctor, and that at least 26% look for health advice on YouTyube.
‘Private Knowledge’
When consumers know they have strange aches and pains, and doctors, and life insurance underwriters, aren’t made aware, that’s a form of “private knowledge,” or undisclosed health information.
The official definition of “adverse selection” is “a market process in which buyers or sellers of a product or service are able to use their private knowledge of the risk factors involved in the transaction to maximize their outcomes, at the expense of the other parties to the transaction,” according to the Britannica.com definition of the term.
The millennials’ unaddressed health concerns could be due mainly to issues of little interest to life and disability insurers, such as acne or baldness. However, in some cases the concerns could relate to more serious issues, such as headaches, that could affect an applicant’s ability to come out of a medical underwriting process qualifying for “preferred plus” rates.
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