Low-income Americans ages 18 to 64 with cancer saved about US$1,250 per year on treatment within seven years of the 2014 rollout of the Affordable Care Act , according to my recent study . Those patients either personally earned or were in families that made $17,609 or less per year and therefore were eligible for Medicaid , the government’s primary health insurance program for low-income Americans. But adults under 65 with at least $51,000 in annual income – and private health insurance coverage – saw their costs increase by $3,100 per year during the same period.
And that increase magnified the financial havoc cancer can cause. I am a doctoral candidate in pharmaceutical health outcomes and policy . I conducted this study with two other scholars, Douglas Thornton at the University of Houston and Chan Shen at Penn State .
We wanted to learn how the ACA had changed what cancer patients spend on treatment costs. To find out, we examined data from a U.S.
government database spanning the years 2011 to 2020. We excluded people treated for nonmelanoma skin cancer, because it’s more easily treatable than other cancers. These expenditures included health insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs such as copays, deductibles, hospital stays, doctor’s office visits, emergency services and home health care services.
We compared these costs over the three years before the ACA’s implementation, 2011 to 2013, and the seven years after, 2014 to 2020. We excluded people 65 or ol.