Faculty Bibliography

Patients traveling for cancer treatment often incur financial burdens. The members of the Alliance of Dedicated Cancer Centers should play a role in mitigating housing-associated costs for patients during cancer treatment.

IMPORTANCE:Health insurance coverage is dynamic in the United States, potentially changing from month to month. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) aimed to stabilize markets and reduce financial burden, particularly among those with preexisting conditions. OBJECTIVE:To describe the risks of insurance churn (ie, gain, loss, or change in coverage) and catastrophic health expenditures among nonelderly patients with cancer in the United States, assessing for changes associated with ACA implementation. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS:This retrospective, cross-sectional study uses data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, a representative sample of the US population from 2005 to 2018. Respondents included were younger than 65 years, identified by health care use associated with a cancer diagnosis code in the given year. Statistical analysis was conducted from July 30, 2020, to January 5, 2021. EXPOSURES:The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES:Survey weights were applied to generate estimates for the US population. Annual risks of insurance churn (ie, any uninsurance or insurance change or loss) and catastrophic health expenditures (spending >10% income) were calculated, comparing subgroups with the adjusted Wald test. Weighted multivariable linear regression was used to assess for changes associated with ACA implementation. RESULTS:From 6069 respondents, we estimated a weighted mean of 4.78 million nonelderly patients (95% CI, 4.55-5.01 million; female patients: weighted mean, 63.9% [95% CI, 62.2%-65.7%]; mean age, 50.3 years [95% CI, 49.7-50.8 years]) with cancer annually in the United States. Patients with cancer experienced lower annual risks of insurance loss (5.3% [95% CI, 4.5%-6.1%] vs 7.6% [95% CI, 7.4%-7.8%]) and any uninsurance (14.6% [95% CI, 13.3%-16.0%] vs 24.1% [95% CI, 23.5%-24.7%]) but increased risk of catastrophic health expenditures (expenses alone: 12.4% [95% CI, 11.2%-13.6%] vs 6.3% [95% CI, 6.2%-6.5%]; including premiums: 26.6% [95% CI, 25.0%-28.1%] vs 16.5% [95% CI, 16.1%-16.8%]; P < .001) relative to the population without cancer. Patients with cancer from low-income families and with full-year private coverage were at particularly high risk of catastrophic health expenditures (including premiums: 81.7% [95% CI, 74.6%-88.9%]). After adjustment, low income was the factor most strongly associated with both insurance churn and catastrophic spending, associated with annual risk increases of 6.5% (95% CI, 4.2%-8.8%) for insurance loss, 17.3% (95% CI, 13.4%-21.2%) for any uninsurance, and 37.4% (95% CI, 33.3%-41.6%) for catastrophic expenditures excluding premiums (P < .001). In adjusted models relative to 2005-2009, full ACA implementation (2014-2018) was associated with a decreased annual risk of any uninsurance (-4.2%; 95% CI, -7.4% to -1.0%; P = .01) and catastrophic spending by expenses alone (-3.0%; 95% CI, -5.3% to -0.8%; P = .008) but not including premiums (0.4%; 95% CI, -2.8% to 4.5%; P = .82). CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCE:In this cross-sectional study, US patients with cancer faced significant annual risks of insurance churn and catastrophic health spending. Despite some improvements with ACA implementation, large burdens remained, and further reform is needed to protect this population from excessive hardship.

An important function of health insurance is protecting enrollees from excessively burdensome charges for unanticipated medical events. Unexpected surgery can be financially catastrophic for uninsured people. By targeting the low-income uninsured population, Medicaid expansion had the potential to reduce the financial risks associated with these events. We used two data sources (state-level data for forty-four states and patient-level data for four states) to estimate the association of Medicaid expansion with uninsured surgical hospitalizations among nonelderly adults. Uninsured surgery cases were typically admitted through the emergency department-often for common emergency procedures-and 99 percent of them were estimated to be associated with financially catastrophic visit charges. We found that Medicaid expansion was associated with reductions in both the share (6.20 percent) and the population rate (7.85 per 10,000) of uninsured surgical discharges in expansion versus nonexpansion states. Our estimates suggest that in 2019 alone, adoption of Medicaid expansion in nonexpansion states could have prevented more than 50,000 incidences of catastrophic financial burden resulting from uninsured surgery.