Maybe this is just a case of little old universal healthcare believer me encountering opinion bias (i.e. I’ll only see articles that support my belief in my little media bubble) but this study, “Impact of Medicaid disenrollment in Tennessee on breast cancer stage at diagnosis and treatment” is kind of a “no duh” moment.
If you don’t have health insurance, why would you get a mammogram? It’s expensive and the potential outcomes are super-scary. I wouldn’t do it unless I had insurance that meant no out-of-pocket cost for myself. And chemo? Radiation? Probably not on the menu unless you have insurance. These are services, by the way, NOT provided by emergency healthcare facilities: so there’s super-limited choices of where you can get these treatments.
From the FoodForBreastCancer.com website’s (so, obviously not politically motivated but actually just focused on health, nutrition, and cancer) take on the study:
“In short, a typical pattern for an uninsured women is a delay in obtaining a mammogram until the tumor is palpable, followed by treatment delays as the woman struggles to access whatever resources may be available for to pay for treatment, followed by potentially substandard treatment and a lack of adequate follow-up care. Each of these suboptimal steps in detection through survivorship have the potential to result in increased breast cancer-specific mortality.”
They compared women by groups living in higher vs lower income zip codes. Guess who is getting delays in diagnosis and substandard treatment? Guess who doesn’t experience those delays? Now let me make it clear that I believe getting Breast Cancer is NOT anyone’s fault. You can’t victim-blame it on women like lung cancer patients get for being ex-smokers. So yes, disenrolling Medicaid patients probably won’t impact middle and rich in the U.S…..but “no duh” you’re going to be condemning women who are already getting screwed by fate/genetics/environmental poisoning.
Text “resist” to 50409 right now, this very moment, and tell your Senators that the current Health Bill being proposed that cuts Medicaid and adds millions to the uninsured, is not a good idea.
What I Should Have Said 