The Affordable Care Act may be leaving American policy shortly after its chief advocate leaves office. Democrats are keenly aware that the incoming administration may do to Obamacare what President Obama did to No Child Left Behind and NASA's Constellation program. To try and keep much of it intact, they aee touting its benefits, but many are being spun in partisan fashion. Of the new enrollees, 10.8 million were just added to Medicaid, it didn't take insurance company subsidies to accomplish that, and young people under the age of 26 were forced onto parental programs, which cost companies more money but didn't improve the health of anyone.
A new analysis shows even the poorest people aren't getting better cancer screening.
Though the Affordable Care Act eliminated such out-of-pocket expenditures for cancer preventive services, the use of colonoscopy has not increased. The investigators suspect that this may be due to other barriers related to colonoscopy, such as the need for bowel preparation or a loophole where a subset of colonoscopies still require out-of-pocket expenses. Mammography services did improve, according to the examination of Medicare claims data, identifying women ≥70 years old without mammography in the previous two years and men and women ≥70 years old at increased risk for colorectal cancer without colonoscopy in the past five years. The team also identified which patients were screened in the two-year period prior to the ACA’s implementation (2009-2010) and after its implementation (2011-September 2012).
“Although the future of the ACA is now questioned, the findings do support, at least for mammography, that elimination of financial barriers is associated with improvement in cancer screening,” said Gregory Cooper, MD, of University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center and the Case Comprehensive Cancer Center. “The findings have implications for other efforts to provide services to traditionally underserved patients, including the use of Medicaid expansion.”