Cost Concerns Lead to Cancer Treatment Delays, Nonadherence

TOPLINE:

When patients deal directly with their insurance companies for answers about copayments and other issues, they are more likely to experience delays in cancer care and to be nonadherent.

METHODOLOGY:

Navigating the complexities of insurance coverage is difficult for cancer patients, and the clinical impact of managing these intricacies remains unclear.
To understand the issue, investigators surveyed 510 insured cancer patients in the United States about how often they estimate out-of-pocket costs for medications, doctors’ visits, and lab tests and scans, as well as how often they ask their insurance company to help them understand their coverage and how often they appeal coverage decisions.
The team then correlated the answers with how often patients reported postponing or skipping doctors’ appointments and lab tests and how often they delayed filling prescriptions or skipped doses.
Breast, colorectal, lung, and prostate cancer were the most common diagnoses among respondents.

TAKEAWAY:

Overall, 55% of participants said they “never” or “rarely” engaged in any insurance-related cost tasks. The most frequently performed administrative tasks included finding out the cost before filling a prescription (28%) or before undergoing lab tests or scans (20%), as well as estimating the cost before agreeing to a treatment (20%), asking an insurance company for help understanding coverage (18%), or appealing a denial (17%).
After adjusting for age, race/ethnicity, education, and monthly out-of-pocket costs, participants who engaged in any cost task were 18% more likely to experience treatment delays or forgo care.
Every additional cost task or increase in frequency of a cost task was associated with 32% higher frequency of treatment delay or nonadherence.
Age, race, and monthly out-of-pocket costs were more strongly associated with treatment delays/nonadherence than cost-task burden. Younger patients and Black patients were more likely than others to experience cost-related delays/nonadherence.

IN PRACTICE:

“Reductions to administrative burden on patients, whether through patient-level education interventions, the adaptation of hospital-based navigation programs, or policy-focused changes to insurance systems, will be crucial” for helping patients with cancer to overcome administrative burdens and improve access to care, the authors said.

SOURCE:

The study, led by Meredith Doherty, PhD, of the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, was published August 30 in Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers and Prevention.

LIMITATIONS:

The survey was voluntary, which raises the possibility of self-selection bias. Recall bias may also have occurred, particularly among patients farther out from diagnosis and treatment. The investigators did not include uninsured patients and did not stratify patients by insurance type, and they did not measure or account for healthcare literacy.

DISCLOSURES:

The study was funded by the American Cancer Society. The investigators have disclosed no relevant financial relationships.

M. Alexander Otto is a physician assistant with a master’s degree in medical science. He is an award-winning medical journalist who worked for several major news outlets before joining Medscape and is an MIT Knight Science Journalism fellow. Email: [email protected].

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