February 10th, 2018 – According to a recent study, people who are married and covered by private insurance had a better survival rate than single people covered by private programs like Medicaid and Medicare.
Researchers at Yale University found that married patients lived 40% longer than those who never married.
They also found that people with private insurance lived 30% longer than those covered by Medicaid and 20% longer than people covered by Medicare. The latter is hardly surprising, as people on Medicare are most often 65 years old or older and people who are covered by private insurance are most often under age 65. The study’s average ages were 69 for Medicare, 59 for private insurance and 57 for Medicaid.
The type of insurance people had also impacted the care that cancer patients received. Ninety-one percent of those with private insurance received cancer-directed treatments. Whereas only 84 percent of patients who had Medicare or 78 percent who had Medicaid received cancer-directed treatments.
