Cancer Patients Suffering From Lack of Private Health Insurance

by Tanya Thomas on  October 04, 2010 at 11:05 AM Health Insurance News
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Lack of private health insurance and its consequent lack of access to care appears to affect mortality among patients with uterine cancer and may partly explain the mortality disparity between African-Americans and other racial groups, according to data presented at the Third AACR Conference on The Science of Cancer Health Disparities.

"African-Americans were twice as likely to die within four years compared to white patients after adjusting for age, facility and education level. However, when insurance, treatment and clinical factors were accounted for, this likelihood decreased to 30 percent greater," said Dana Chase, M.D., a clinical fellow at the University of California, Irvine.

Chase and colleagues presented a retrospective analysis on 178,891 patients in the National Cancer Database. Whites made up approximately 74 percent of the cohort, while Hispanics comprised 5 percent and 9 percent were African-Americans. The remaining patients did not have specific racial information.

The unadjusted four-year survival rate with uterine cancer was 82 percent for whites and Hispanics, but only 63 percent for African-Americans. Some of the differences in survival by race were accounted for by more advanced stage of disease at diagnosis. However, even after accounting for disease severity, African-Americans experienced poorer survival compared to white patients.

The unadjusted four-year survival rates were 80.7 percent among uninsured, 75.93 percent for Medicaid insured, 79.45 percent for younger Medicare patients, 69.35 percent for older Medicare patients and 88.93 percent for privately insured patients.

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