Word Spy - worried wealthy

n. Wealthy people who order expensive, uninsured medical tests as a precautionary measure.

Example Citations:

You may have seen the ads. "How 17 seconds can save your life," reads one promotion for a center in Cherry Hill, N.J., featuring a middle-aged, vibrant-looking couple.

Health centers are marketing full- or whole-body scans to "the worried wealthy," as some have coined them.
—Sono Motoyama, "Distressed test — Will full-body scan find what ails you?," Philadelphia Daily News, March 22, 2004

Hordes of consumers, often called "the worried wealthy," are flocking to medical centers and mobile trailers around the country to have their bodies scanned by three-dimensional computerized X-rays from chest to groin.

They are not sent by physicians, and most have no symptoms to warrant exposing themselves to radiation doses that may add up to the equivalent of 500 chest X-rays, the National Radiological Protection Board says.

Rather, these anxious consumers are spending many hundreds of nonreimbursable dollars on total body C.T. scans to reassure themselves that nothing is wrong internally that would warrant prompt treatment.
—Jane E. Brody, "How Perils Can Await the 'Worried Wealthy'," The New York Times, November 12, 2002

Earliest Citation:

While insurance almost never pays for the procedure on people who don't have symptoms, the scans could become a factor for hospitals, healthcare providers and insurers, such as Santa Ana-based PacifiCare Health Systems Inc.

If "the worried wealthy well" can get full-body scanning and the market becomes saturated, "then the average person will demand access — somebody's going to have to pay," said Dr. Jim Doty, a former chief of neurosurgery at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach.
—"Body scanning draws lines among health players," Orange County Business Journal, September 10, 2001

Notes:

This sense of the phrase refers to people who are anxious about their health and are wealthy enough to afford hundreds or even thousands of dollars for procedures such as heart scans, virtual colonoscopies, and full-body scans using electron-beam-tomography (EBT) or computed-tomography (CT). Another sense of the phrase — wealthy people who are worried about losing their money — is much older, dating to at least the mid-70s,

Categories:

Money
Health and Fitness
Medicine
People

Posted on March 24, 2004