Rising Healthcare Costs In Your Senior Years: Tips To Save Money!
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Most people don’t know this, but the cost of healthcare in your senior years is rising at a scarily rapid rate. Looking at your healthcare costs in general, new research discovered that a 65-year-old retiring in 2024 will spend upwards of $165,000 in retirement – that’s a 5% increase from 2023 and double what someone might spend if they retired in 2002!
This should already be a worrying statistic – but there’s more. Additional research from the Consumer Price Index indicates that the cost of home healthcare for the elderly has increased by 14.2$% in the last year alone. In other words, it’s becoming increasingly more expensive to look after ourselves when we reach our latter years.
If this isn’t something you’ve been thinking about, now is the time to start. Even if you’re well away from reaching retirement age, careful planning and foresight are the keys to dealing with rising healthcare costs for seniors. Or, perhaps you’ll find the advice helpful to reduce the costs of looking after your parents or grandparents right now.
Regardless, things must be done, and here are the tips to save money on senior healthcare:
Table of Contents
Enroll in a Senior Health Plan
The most obvious starting point is with a senior health plan. Many exist, and they all serve to help you get comprehensive healthcare coverage tailored to your needs when you’re older. The best senior health plans will cover critical services like:
- Hospital stays
- Doctor’s visits
- Prescription drugs
- Rehabilitation services
- Home healthcare
- Long-term care
You could extend this list depending on the plan you enroll in, but the whole concept of these plans is to provide financial protection for seniors. A senior health plan caters to the unique health needs of an elderly person. It’s built around the idea that you’ll experience more health problems in your latter years than you will in your younger ones.
From a financial perspective, you’ll pay a premium each month to get all the coverage you need. Based on the rising costs of general healthcare services, you could save a fortune with the right plan. All it tends to take is one large medical bill for one problem to break the bank, but these plans protect you from this financial uncertainty. As with everything you pay for in life, make sure to compare different providers and plans until you find the best deal for your needs.
Place Preventative Care in the Spotlight
The Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion is very big on preventative care, labeling it the “best medicine” anyone can take. Preventative care services exist for two main reasons:
- To help prevent future health problems from developing
- To identify potential issues early, preventing them from getting worse
A lot of the issues and conditions elderly adults face were preventable at some point. Heart disease or cardiovascular problems are both highly common in seniors, and we tend to just put that down to aging. While your age can play a part, preventative care when you’re younger could easily stop heart problems from developing.
The same is true for many other things, and all you need to do is prioritize preventative care services. Make sure you’re going to all of your scheduled health checkups or screenings. Don’t be afraid to take vaccinations every year for the cold/flu when you’re eligible. Things like this work wonders for your long-term health – and you should pay attention to them while you’re younger!
Even something as simple as going to regular dental checkups in your youth can save a fortune when you get to 65 or older. It helps you maintain good oral health, which could stop you from needing to replace loads of teeth or pay for implants/dentures. Most importantly, all of your preventative health checkups/screenings make it easier for the experts to identify possible issues. On the most extreme scale, a screening could spot the early signs of a cancerous tumor developing. Spotting it at this stage makes it all the more treatable and can save thousands of dollars in treatment – not to mention saving your life as well.
Live Healthily & Remain Physically Active
Following on from the discussion about preventative care, living healthily is one of the best things you can do to save money on healthcare when you’re older. Again, this is something you can do now if you’re young and nowhere near retirement. If you’re approaching the retirement age, then it’s still not too late!
Adopt simple healthy habits to improve your health and reduce the risk of dealing with expensive healthcare problems. The two main things are as follows:
- Eat a balanced diet
- Stay as physically active as possible
A “balanced diet” simply means you get all the right nutrients to maintain a healthy body and support your internal systems. The Nutrition Source by Harvard Health has a great Healthy Eating Plate you can use as a guide to make every meal healthier. Each meal should have a good balance of vegetables, whole grains, fruits, and healthy proteins. Drink lots of water while you’re at it – and don’t neglect healthy fats to improve your heart health. What you put in your body will affect the way it responds to different issues and can prevent loads of common problems in later life – like diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, etc.
Moreover, being physically active can support your healthy diet and reduce the chances of many preventable physical health problems. Did you know that 1 in 3 older adults fall each year? Additionally, adults are in the high-risk group for chronic bone and joint conditions like osteoporosis and arthritis. Physical activity helps prevent all of these issues. Focus on building strength in your muscles to support your joints and keep them healthy. This also improves your balance, which can prevent falls (and the costly operations that tend to follow).
Starting your health kick when you’re younger makes it far less likely you’ll have common health concerns in your senior years and will save an utter fortune on healthcare costs. But switching to a healthier lifestyle when you’re older can still make a world of difference.
Reduce the Cost of Prescription Drugs
If you’re already approaching your senior years, then you’ve likely seen your prescription drug count keep increasing year after year. Those of you in the younger audience may see parents or grandparents with pill boxes practically bursting full of different drugs. We take prescription medication to treat different diseases – and looking after our health as we age can greatly lower the number of drugs we need.
Nevertheless, other things should be looked at further to reduce the cost of prescription drugs for seniors. As we mentioned earlier, a senior health plan should include drug coverage. This tends to cover your drug costs up to a certain amount, reducing how much you need to pay out of pocket. For people with chronic lifelong conditions, this type of coverage is essential. You can’t avoid taking certain medications, so you need to find ways of lowering the costs.
Using generic drugs instead of branded ones is another way to keep the costs as low as possible. For those that don’t know, generic drugs are medications created to be the same as ones already in circulation under brand names. They contain the same active ingredients and work the same way – yet the FDA reports they can be almost 80-85% cheaper than branded drugs.
What’s the catch? There is none! Generic drugs are just as safe as branded ones, but it sometimes takes a long time for generic drugs to appear on the market. Check out Drugs@FDA to see if your prescription medication has a generic counterpart you can get for much cheaper. Simply search for the brand and check if it has any “Therapeutic Equivalents.”
The final way you can reduce the cost of prescription drugs is by re-assessing if you actually need them. Being eligible for a prescription and needing a prescription are two different things. Pain medication is the big one to consider; are there better ways of managing your pain without spending money on prescription drugs? Perhaps some holistic methods will yield long-term benefits and either completely negate the need for medication or gradually wean you off it. Focus more on treating the actual issues you have rather than using drugs to mask or manage the symptoms. To reiterate, there will be times when you need prescription medication – this tip is for instances when you realize other options are available.
Save Money on Healthcare Costs in Your Senior Years
The big thing to take from this post is that healthcare costs are rising for the older generation. They’re already expensive now, so who knows how costly they’ll be in the future. However, you can do many things to keep your costs as low as possible. Focus on your health now and prevent many issues from manifesting later in life. Look into different health plans with the right coverage and don’t be afraid to pursue different treatment options instead of splashing the cash on prescription meds.
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