The Benefits of Health Insurance Plans on Cancer Care

Table of Content

1. The Study

2. The Outcome

3. What We Learn

Cancer is a disease that has prompted several studies in the medical world. The dreaded disease continues to spread, affecting more and more people every year. While there is treatment available, it generally comes at an incredibly high cost. A few years ago, Sandra Wong, a renowned surgeon, decided to study the impact a person’s health insurance status has on the kind of cancer care they can receive. She specifically looked into the kind of care that economically and socially disadvantaged people received.

The Study

To get the kind of details required for their study, Wong’s team at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center collected registry data for 364,507 cancer patients from the years 2007 to 2011. The sample group only consisted of individuals who suffered from the four highest causes of cancer deaths – prostate cancer, breast cancer, colorectal cancer, and lung cancer.

From the data collected, Wong found that over 80% of the group had health insurance, while 12% had only Medicaid. Amazingly, 4.6% of the group had no insurance at all. The individuals from the sample group were also stratified into various social groups based on their education, employment and wealth. Wong’s researchers found that there was consistent relation between cancer care, survival and outcomes, and an individual’s relative social advantage. While individuals who had a higher advantage over others had better access to medical treatments and cancer care, with the help of insurance, disadvantaged individuals could also benefit from similar care.

The Outcome

What Wong found was that disadvantaged communities have a lot more to benefit from health insurance than individuals from advantaged communities. Despite this, she found that provisions for insurance still lack the power to eliminate the inequalities that are being faced by cancer patients.

What We Learn

While Sandra Wong did her study in America, it is relevant to us in India, too. Cancer is one of the fastest-growing diseases in the country, and we need to prepare ourselves to be able to deal with it. Sadly, cancer treatment in India is costly, and individuals from low-income groups struggle to afford the care that they need and deserve. In such cases, cancer care insurance becomes crucial. By putting aside a little money every month and year, every individual will be able to afford a good cancer insurance policy. If and when the disease does strike, the health policy will help look after the cost for treatment.

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