Poor literacy skills take toll on health, economy

From Google Health to Wii Fit, Americans have an increasingly wide array of tools for tracking their health backgrounds and statistics but their understanding of what that data means is poor, threatening their health and costing the economy billions of dollars.

Just 12% of American adults are health literate at a level that allows them to manage their care, the latest News and Numbers statement from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) showed.

The AHRQ release is based on information from the 2007 National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Report, which found that the majority of Americans lacked the skills required to correctly complete health care-related activities like reading a prescription bottle, figuring out medication dosage, filling out forms or calculating insurance coverage. That lack of literacy can negatively affect the quality of care a patient receives and costs the U.S. economy between $106 billion and $236 billion annually, the University of Connecticut said in a report last year. That's enough to insure all of the more than 47 million Americans currently without coverage. Read more of this Reuters article at Canada.com.