Although the United States has one of the world’s most significant public healthcare expenditures, it is the only high-income country without publicly financed universal health insurance. Despite a recent slowdown in overall spending, the United States spends more on health care than other high-income nations and still has some of the worst health results. The United States spends more than 3 trillion dollars on the healthcare sector annually. Still, it has the lowest life expectancy at birth, the worst infant mortality rate, and the highest frequency of chronic illnesses among its worldwide counterparts (Bush, 2018). With more public money spent on health care, only 34 percent of the population is covered by Medicare and Medicaid.
A person’s capacity to prevent, detect, treat, and survive cancer can be hampered by a variety of obstacles. These impediments are the result of deep-seated, long-standing disparities at all levels of society, which will require a concerted effort to remove if cancer outcomes are to be equal. Cancer health inequities are defined as disparities in cancer measures such as new cases, deaths, cancer–related health complications, survivorship, quality of life after cancer treatment, screening rates, and stage at diagnosis that exist among specific population groups (National Cancer Institute [NCI], 2021). These disparities in burden exist across racial and ethnic groupings, socioeconomic groups, locations, and other factors.
Progress in cancer prevention, early detection, and treatment has lowered total cancer mortality in the United States over the last decade. However, development is still unevenly distributed and, in some circumstances, inadequately described across demographic categories. For example, regardless of the stage at diagnosis, African American people, patients residing in rural areas, and groups with lower income and education levels continue to have worse survival rates for many malignancies (Patel et al., 2020). Despite significant progress in cancer treatment, screening, diagnosis, and prevention over the last several decades, addressing cancer health disparities in certain populations—such as higher cancer death rates, less frequent use of proven screening tests, and higher rates of advanced cancer diagnoses—has lagged.
These unequal results become much more pronounced when other social factors are included. Although lung cancer rates among Black males have decreased overall, individuals residing in rural regions had higher incidence and death rates than the rest of the population (Patel et al., 2020). NCI (2021) also supports that people from low-socioeconomic categories, particularly racial and ethnic groupings and those residing in physically remote places, are susceptible to these inequalities. For instance, inequities in oncology include a greater incidence of a particularly aggressive form of breast cancer among African American women, a higher incidence of liver cancer among Asians, greater rates of cervical cancer incidence, and mortality among Hispanic and African American women than women of other ethnic groups. Other disparities in cancer treatment include women in the highest income band being more likely than women in the lowest income bracket to have had their cervical cancer screening. Moreover, patients of a low socioeconomic group are 50 percent less likely to receive chemotherapy (American Association for Cancer Research [AACR], n.d.). These disparities demonstrate the lack of equal access to care for everyone, which can be considered a severe nationwide social-economic issue.
Lack of access to healthcare facilities, state and federal health-insurance legislation, and hospital and physician payment laws are only a few of these variables. Even though improving awareness of cancer’s causes may not be enough to erase health inequalities, appropriate treatments for various populations must be developed. Inequities will not be removed until systemic measures that promote health equity, such as universal health insurance coverage and equal access, are implemented.
References
American Association for Cancer Research. (n.d.). Cancer health disparities. Web.
Bush, M. (2018). Addressing the root cause: Rising health care costs and social determinants of health.North Carolina Medical Journal, 79(1), 26-29. Web.
National Cancer Institute. (2021). Cancer health disparities research. Web.
Patel, M. I., Lopez, A. M., Blackstock, W., Reeder-Hayez, K., Moushey, A., Phillips, J. & Tap, W. (2020). Cancer disparities and health equity: A policy statement from the American society of clinical oncology.Journal of Clinical Oncology, 38(29), 3439-3448. Web.