The controversial health care law nicknamed Obamacare has made a measureable difference in reducing uninsured adults.
The number of adults who have cancer insurance coverage saw a striking increase with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Following Obamacare, a much higher number of Americans who had already received a cancer diagnosis now have health plans.
It is yet unknown whether or not the latest health care reforms will continue this positive trend.
This cancer insurance conclusion was presented in a study published in the JAMA Oncology journal. The study was titled “Cancer treatment can be expensive or unaffordable for people without insurance.” The National Cancer Institute’s Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results Program data was used to draw the study conclusions.
“We wanted to understand what the ACA did, especially for vulnerable populations,” said Indiana University Kelley School of Business doctoral candidate, Aparna Soni, who led the study. “Cancer treatment can be expensive or unaffordable for people without insurance.”
The cancer insurance study was a comparison of data leading up to the ACA with data following its implementation.
The comparison involved the years leading up to the Affordable Care Act’s implementation of the individual mandate, from 2010 to 2013, with the circumstance after the implementation in 2014. It was an examination of the data from over 850,000 American adults aged 19 through 64 and who did not have health insurance when they were first diagnosed with cancer. What the research determined was that there was a reduction in the uninsured rate among those adults from 5.75 before ACA to 3.81 percent after Obamacare became effective.
This represents a considerable 33.5 percent improvement as a result of the health care reforms. Prior research indicated that are were a number of socioeconomic factors playing a role in cancer’s survival rate. Adequate health insurance coverage is one of those factors. The Affordable Care Act requires health insurance companies to cover Americans even if they have a preexisting condition and without increasing their premiums excessively.
As a result, Americans have been able to obtain their cancer insurance coverage through the federal and state run exchanges.