I’m not going to go into the whys and wherefores of what’s wrong with cancer care in this country. But when the IOM said that people die early because of uninsurance, people scoffed. The same people (and you know who you are David Gratzer) say (pretty disingenuously) that we do cancer care much better than countries with universal insurance, and for at least partly that reason universal insurance is a bad idea.
So presumably they have a good answer for this new report from the American Cancer Society, which essentially shows that–whatever the state of American cancer care maybe overall–you’re much more more likely to have a good outcome if you’ve got insurance. Some tidbits from the release:
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 Anonymouse insightfully commented, the Harvard team’s RHIO study in Health Affairs is very telling
