Wade Swenson, Medical Oncologist and Hematologist at Rural Cancer Institute, Professor of Internal Medicine at Anne Burnett Marion School of Medicine at Texas Christian University, Presidential Leadership Scholar, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“New research from the Rural Cancer Institute asks a question that rarely appears in oncology literature: does social support affect whether cancer patients can afford their care?
The answer, it turns out, is yes, and the magnitude matters.
Using nationally representative NHIS data on nearly 6,000 adults with cancer histories, Ingrid Jacobson, Andrew Armstrong, and Zachary Schroeder found that those with frequent social support had significantly lower odds of all three healthcare unaffordability indicators, even after adjusting for income, insurance, and rurality.
The predicted probability of being unable to pay medical bills was 5% among those with strong social support versus 11.5% among those without. For worrying about bills, the gap was 36% versus 52%.
Social support is not a soft variable. It may be a financial one.
What would it look like to screen for social support the same way we screen for food insecurity or housing instability? That’s the clinical and policy question this paper raises, and one worth taking seriously.
Jacobson et al., Discover Public Health, 2026.”
Title: Social support as a novel predictor of healthcare affordability among adults with lifetime histories of cancer
Authors: Ingrid Jacobson, Andrew Armstrong, and Zachary Schroeder
Read The Full Article
Other articles featuring Wade Swenson on OncoDaily.