(Bloomberg) — The nation's top cancer doctors are more likely to be excluded from low-cost health insurance plans offered on the nation's individual market, potentially crimping access to the highest-quality care for Americans when they need it most, a new study found.
(Related: 10 Top ACA Individual Risk-Adjustment Bills)
The individual exchanges, opened in 2014 as part of the Affordable Care Act, often include lower-cost policies that limit the number of physicians available to members as a way to cut costs. Those "narrow networks" are becoming more prevalent in the individual major medical market, as insurers seek ways to offer cheaper coverage, according to McKinsey & Co. The study was published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology and examined data from 2014.
The study offers a sense of the tradeoffs Americans face when buying health care coverage on their own: Plans with lower premiums often get costs down by limiting choices of doctors and hospitals, asking patients to pay more out of pocket, or some combination of the two. It's an issue patients are increasingly facing in insurance provided by employers, too, and one they'd likely continue to deal with under Republican plans to change the current Affordable Care Act system. The current GOP proposals offer less financial help for people to buy coverage and could shift more people into lower-cost plans.
For the study, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania analyzed data on 23,442 oncologists in the U.S., evaluating how often doctors affiliated with National Cancer Institute-designated centers were covered by lower-cost insurance plans. The University of Pennsylvania is an NCI-designated cancer center.
Oncologists working at the U.S.'s 69 NCI facilities in the U.S., which offer access to scientific research and are known for their handling of complex cases, were twice as likely to be excluded from plans with the narrowest networks, according to the study.
"Most common cancers can be treated well anywhere," said Justin Bekelman, associate professor of radiation oncology, medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, and one of the researchers. "But there are many patients with rare or uncommon tumors who need access to the most advanced clinical trials, and that access is often only at these NCI cancer centers. On the individual market, when people are spending their own hard-earned dollars, they can chose to have access or not. But right now they are choosing in a blind way."
Network Questions
The Obama administration had been working to make it easier for people to figure out whether individual doctors and drugs were covered by their individual major medical plans by looking up such information online. It's harder for consumers to determine the comprehensiveness of an insurance plan's network, however, and so far there's only been a limited effort to require plans to disclose the overall size of their networks.
(Image: Thinkstock)
