Demographics of Health Care - where do people get sick?

How do you budget for health care costs?  How do you react when you get sick?  Do you seek the medical attention first and worry about how to pay for it later or do you hold back on health care because it's not in the budget? Are you influenced by the commercials that run on television?  Is it more than that and perhaps directly related to where you live in the country and the habits of most residents due to weather, economic status, age, culture?

Studies are confirming that certain areas of the country are more prone to certain kinds of illnesses.  Based on Ad Ages/Ipsos observer Amercian Consumer Survey and data from GfkMRI, we'll see how consumers budget for health-care costs, how they think costs will rise, and how they want to receive health-care messages from marketers.

This graphic is a quick overview. Read the full story on AdAge's site to see the mouseover by county across the nation. Interesting, in Multnomah County, there is a high incident rate of Rosacea or skin disease - higher income, more stress, more complicated cosmetics, perhaps?  Same with Salem.  For those Salem residents in Linn County, there are more cases of RLS - restless leg syndrome - more line, factory and workers who are on their feet to earn a living.

Much to the chagrin of doctors in some cases, patients spend more time online researching perceived symptoms after being influenced by television commercials. As much as we all need to become our own advocates, we also have to be careful not to react to advertisers whims by suddenly identifying any ache or pain with whatever what just shown to as as our "answer" to our ailments during the episode of Mike & Molly.

In addition to geographic and behavioral differences, Ad Age partnered with its sibling publication Modern Healthcare to study generational attitudes. The resulting white paper features case studies from marketers as well as profiles of households in the American Consumer Project. In it, we examine the rise of cross-generational care-givers and how different generations want to receive health-care-related marketing messages. Check out the Ad Age/Modern Healthcare White Paper on Generational Attitudes about Health-care.

 

 

Comments

[New Sunset Personal care]

Its hard to budget for them without having an overbudget. Its like planning for bad things to happen...sad.