She’s Spending $13 Billion a Year to Feel Better. Most of It Isn’t Working.
What women in perimenopause are actually buying — and what the data says about it.
Let me start with a number.
Women spend over $13 billion a year managing menopause symptoms. Not lifetime. Per year.
When you break that down, the story gets uncomfortable. Over $10 billion goes to nonmedical treatments — supplements, herbal remedies, sleep stacks, products with “hormonal balance” somewhere on the label. $2.7 billion goes to hormone therapy, the treatment with the strongest clinical track record. And only 26% of women have full insurance coverage for menopause-related prescriptions.
The money is flowing away from what works.
WHERE THE MONEY DOESN'T GO
What she’s buying. What the evidence says. And who benefits from the gap.
The out-of-pocket story doesn’t stop there.
Women aged 45–64 pay over 35% more in out-of-pocket healthcare costs than men the same age, according to GoodRx. A Deloitte analysis of 16 million insured Americans found women pay $15.4 billion more per year than men — and less than 2% of that gap comes from maternity care.
The rest is perimenopause. The rest is menopause. The rest is women seeking care for a transition the system was not designed to manage well.
One in five women has delayed or skipped treatment because of the cost.
So women are spending more. Receiving less. And when the cost gets too high, opting out entirely.
This is the Menopause Tax™ before anyone has named it for her. It’s running whether she tracks it or not.
YOUR NEXT BEST STEP
Here’s where the data problem becomes a decision you can make today.
Before you come to the workshop, do one thing.
Pull the last 90 days of supplement purchases. Add them up. Write the number down.
Not to feel bad about it. Because right now that number is sitting in a mental category called “health and wellness” where spending quietly disappears. When you see it as a line item, it changes how you think about what comes next.
Bring that number with you.
In the Stop Paying the Care Tax Workshop, we calculate the full picture — Care Costs most women don’t know to close — and you leave with five specific moves to start lowering what you owe.
May 30. 10 AM ET. Ten spots. Live on Zoom.