| The utilization of cancer preventive care services including colonoscopy, mammography and pap smears in the United States remains low, despite their established success in reducing cancer deaths. Due to the harmful exposures during their service years veterans may have more negative health outcomes compared to non-veterans. The rising costs of cancer treatment and a focus on quality treatment require the public to understand how VA resources are being used and if they are providing high quality and effective care to our nations' Veterans. To understand the difference in the utilization of preventive services (specifically colonoscopy, mammography and pap smears) in the US between veterans and non-veterans. Veterans have reported reasons for declining preventive services like previous negative results, no time to get tested, no risk factors, getting testing not being a priority, uninterested in knowing, and already infected. This paper assesses the difference in the utilization of preventive services with data from the Household Component (HC) of the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) from 2011. We attempted to understand the differences in utilization of cancer related preventive services between veterans and non-veterans in 2011 stepwise logistic regression, multivariate analyses and multivariate analysis using age stratification. For colonoscopy, cancer preventive service, veterans are more likely to have had a colonoscopy in the past year controlling for a wide range of socio-demographic variables. There is no significant difference in women veterans and women non-veterans and their utilization of mammography and pap smears in the 2011 data. Despite documented evidence in early cancer detection, take up rates for colonoscopy among US veterans is higher than non-veterans. Veterans may be accessing the prevention services available to them in the VA and perhaps awareness and education among non-veterans can increase these rates in the future. |
