LACK OF HEALTH INSURANCE EQUATES WITH HIGHER MORTALITY RATES

I guess it seems logical that those who can’t afford the high cost of medical care would be the ones to die first. But our society, being such as it is, requires that we back up these assumptions with facts and figures. So a new report from the American Cancer Society was recently released that shows “the lack of adequate health insurance coverage is associated with less access to care and poorer outcomes for cancer patients.”  And I’m sure that studies done on other ailments, such as, Alzheimer’s, heart disease or rheumatoid arthritis, for example, show similar results.

The new study findings on stage at diagnosis and survival by insurance status use data from the National Cancer Database (NCDB), a hospital-based registry sponsored by the American College of Surgeons and the American Cancer Society, the only national registry that collects information on patient insurance status. The report finds the uninsured are less likely to receive recommended cancer screening test, are more likely to be diagnosed with later stage disease, and have lower survival rates than those with private insurance.

In my opinion, it is criminal that in a country as wealthy as ours, there are people dying because of limited access to medical care. Why do other countries, such as Canada and the United Kingdom seem to make government-provided medicine work, if haltingly, and we have not even tried? I know the systems in other countries have their glitches, just as any huge nationalized system does, but I maintain that it would still be an improvement over the situation in the United States as it exists right now.

Among the report’s findings:
>For all cancer sites combined, patients who were uninsured were 1.6 times as likely to die in five years as those with private insurance.
>The relationship between access to care and cancer outcomes is particularly striking for several cancers, which can be prevented or detected earlier by screening and for which there are effective treatments, including breast and colorectal cancer.
>At every level of education, individuals with health insurance were about twice as likely as those without health insurance to have had mammography or colorectal cancer screening.

“As our nation’s investments in cancer research provide greater understanding of how to prevent cancer, detect it early, and treat it effectively, access to health care becomes even more important to the American Cancer Society’s goal of eliminating cancer as a major public health problem,” said Otis Brawley, MD, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society. “This report clearly suggests that insurance and cost-related barriers to care are critical to address if we want to ensure that all Americans are able to share in the progress we have achieve by having access to high-quality cancer prevention, early detection, and treatment services.”

“These findings put insurance status squarely on the table as an important factor in cancer care disparities,” said Elizabeth Ward, PhD, director of surveillance research and co-author of the report. “It’s important to note that although variations in health insurance coverage likely contribute to racial and ethnic disparities in cancer outcomes, those disparities persist for several outcomes even when differences in insurance status are accounted for. So even if health insurance and financial barriers can be overcome, further research and interventions will be needed to address these other barriers.”

"The truth is that our national reluctance to face these facts is condemning thousands of people to die from cancer each year and thousands more to die of other diseases," said Elmer Huerta, MD, American Cancer Society president, adding that "for too many hardworking 'average Americans,'  paying for cancer treatment means not paying rent, mortgage (resulting in foreclosure or eviction), or utility bills or even going hungry."

For more information: go to www.acs.org.


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