Comparison of Healthcare Expenditures Among Individuals With and Without Long COVID in the United States, 2026, Duru et al.

[SNT Gatchaman]

Comparison of Healthcare Expenditures Among Individuals With and Without Long COVID in the United States

Spoiler: Authors

Emeka Elvis Duru; Godwin Okoye; Sanghoon Lee; Peter Weir; Jaewhan Kim

Long COVID increases healthcare utilization, yet differences in healthcare spending patterns between individuals with and without long COVID remain poorly characterized, especially at the national level.

To evaluate differences in healthcare expenditures among U.S. adults with and without long COVID using nationally representative data. This cross-sectional study analyzed data from the 2022 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), including 16 762 unweighted adults (weighted population: 239 915 159). Healthcare spending outcomes included total expenditures and specific categories including office-based care, outpatient services, emergency room visits, hospital admissions, home healthcare, and prescription medications. A survey-weighted generalized linear model (GLM) with a log link and gamma distribution was used to estimate adjusted differences in expenditures between groups.

Individuals with long COVID had significantly higher total healthcare expenditures (mean $11 567; SD $25 334) compared to those without long COVID ($7448; SD $21 734, P < .01). After adjusting for demographic characteristics, insurance status, chronic conditions, and other potential confounders, individuals with long COVID incurred 40% higher total expenditures (β = 1.40, P = .01). Expenditures were significantly elevated for office-based visits (35% higher; β = 1.35, P = .02) and outpatient services (118% higher; β = 2.18, P < .01). No significant differences were found in emergency room, hospital admissions, or dental care expenditures.

Long COVID imposes a substantial financial burden on individuals and healthcare systems, primarily through increased outpatient and office-based service utilization. Understanding these spending patterns can help inform policy decisions, optimize healthcare resource allocation, and guide targeted interventions to manage long COVID more effectively.

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[SNT Gatchaman]

This study demonstrates that long COVID is associated with significantly higher healthcare spending, driven primarily by outpatient and office-based care. As the healthcare system continues to adapt to the ongoing impacts of the COVID pandemic, it is crucial to allocate resources efficiently and develop care models that meet the unmet needs of individuals with long COVID, while containing healthcare costs. It is also important to understand where subjects with long COVID visited the most to provide targeted interventions. This information is critical to provide targeted treatment for subjects with long COVID.

Yeah, someone should get on to that.

 

[Utsikt]

Yeah, someone should get on to that.

And maybe we should try to limit the spread of covid while we’re at it..

 

[rvallee]

Long COVID imposes a substantial financial burden on individuals and healthcare systems, primarily through increased outpatient and office-based service utilization

Those expenses are trivial compared to the loss of income and other expenses. Medicine's hubristic habit of only ever looking at things happening within their facilities while claiming to be holistic is so damn weird. There is a complete misunderstanding of the cumulative, and sometimes compounding, nature of chronic losses. Everything is thought out as unrelated episodes happening in a fixed amount of time, there is a complete lack of understanding of how even a chronic low-level problem can become massively more problematic, and expensive, than a severe one that happens to be short.

All of this adds up to the complete misunderstanding of how time lost is definitely permanent. Losing years of life, which sometimes can have major consequences such as never being able to have children, never marrying, never saving money for retirement, and ultimately dying early, alone and miserable, is never understood as a permanent loss. Physicians will keep talking about how there is no permanent damage that they can see, completely oblivious to how the forward nature time is the most permanent thing of all. Future losses can usually be accommodated, sometimes even reversed, but not past ones. Those are forever gone, as permanent as a lost limb in a world with no crutches.

But they only ever look either at how much it costs them, or at costs that they are involved with. Just maddeningly small-minded and self-defeating.

No significant differences were found in emergency room, hospital admissions, or dental care expenditures.

And they obviously miss out on a lot of data because it's literally well-documented that, as a result of negligence and denial of medical care, those patients often end up going to the ER, not having any options. At least for a while, then they give up and get forever lost in a system that doesn't give a damn about us.