Young cancer patients live the longest when they have this insurance: UTA study
Young people on private health insurance lived longer after a cancer diagnosis than their peers on public insurance or who were uninsured, according to a new study published by researchers at the University of Texas at Arlington.
“(Patients) were less likely to die if they had private insurance versus whether they had no insurance or were publicly insured,” said Tara Martin, a clinical assistant professor of nursing at UTA.
The study, published in the Journal of Adolescent and Young Adult Oncology, was a systematic review of 10 observational studies, which together included nearly 470,000 Americans between 15 and 39.
The researchers said they expected young people without health insurance to fare worse than their insured counterparts, but they didn’t expect to see such a big discrepancy between public and private insurance.
“It’s kind of shocking, actually,” said Zhaoli Liu, an assistant professor of nursing at UTA.
The researchers hypothesized that people on private health insurance were more likely to be enrolled in clinical research trials and were able to find doctors more easily than those on public health insurance. The researchers said there was more research needed on why public insurance did not perform as well as private insurance.
“Our public health insurance system, for whatever reason, does not provide the same level of care as our private insurance does,” Martin said.
In Texas, there are thousands of young people without health insurance. The state has the worst rate of uninsurance in the nation, with 22% of adults under 65 lacking health insurance. There are about 930,000 Texans over 21 with Medicaid health insurance, according to state data.
Martin said the researchers decided to focus on adolescents and young adults because of the unique stage of life they were in. Young adults experience life changes like leaving home, starting jobs, and aging out of their parents’ health insurance at age 26. In the U.S., children can stay on their parents’ health insurance until they are 26 under the Affordable Care Act. Rhonda Winegar, an assistant professor of nursing at UTA, said allowing children to stay on their parents’ health insurance past age 26 could be a possible policy solution for legislators to consider.
“The more I researched about them, the more I recognized them as being a somewhat vulnerable population, not for the normal reasons we think of vulnerability, but because of where they are in their life,” Martin said.
Martin added that young people are one of the most “underresearched populations” and are less likely to be included in research.
More young people have been diagnosed with cancer in recent decades. A report from the National Cancer Institute last year found that between 2010 and 2019, rates of 14 cancers increased in people under 50.
