Health Insurance Navigation Tool helps survivors
Elyse Park, PhD, MPH
Many years ago, researcher Elyse Park asked a group of childhood cancer survivors why they smoked. What stressors triggered them to have a cigarette?
One answer rose to the top: worrying about health insurance.
“This stress over health insurance – lack of access or poor quality – directly affects survivors' physical and emotional health,” says Park, PhD, MPH. She is the director of the Health Promotion and Resiliency Intervention Research Center at Mass General/Harvard Medical School.
That finding inspired Park, who is also a professor of psychiatry and medicine, to learn why health insurance caused so much stress.
She and her team learned that survivors, like many others in the United States, find health insurance confusing. Not understanding how to choose plans and providers kept people from making better decisions about health care. The problem is called low health insurance literacy. Studies have shown that low health insurance literacy can cause people to skip needed medical care.
To choose the best plan, look at the total cost and what is covered.
“We found that a lot of survivors didn't know about their insurance plans,” Park says. “In some cases, survivors knew their plans were not as good as they wanted, but they seemed just happy to have them.”
Health insurance navigation tool
This led Park and her team to create the Health Insurance Navigation Tool (HINT) program to improve survivors’ health insurance knowledge. The program includes 4 online sessions with a health insurance navigator. Researchers wanted to see if survivors would complete all 4 sessions and if the tool increased their health insurance knowledge.
The study involved 82 childhood cancer survivors in the LTFU Study. About 80% (4 in 5) of people completed all 4 sessions. Researchers found that survivors who completed the sessions reported increased knowledge and health insurance satisfaction. Results of this study appeared in the medical journal JCO Oncology Practice. Park and her team are currently testing different ways to deliver the HINT program with over 500 LTFU Study participants.
“Health insurance makes people anxious,” Park says. “People avoid thinking about it. We’ve shown that once you have the information, you have the power to make decisions.”
Ways to increase your understanding of health insurance
In the future, Park hopes the HINT program can help more childhood cancer survivors. She encourages survivors to talk to their health care team and find educational resources about health insurance. She also suggests involving their families and others. Studies show most adults in the U.S. have low health insurance literacy.
“Low health insurance literacy is not specific to survivors,” Park says. “It is very important for people who have been treated for cancer to understand health insurance, but it's helpful for everyone.”