Paying to pee: A national survey of urinary catheter users’ costs and coverage

PurposeThis study aimed to survey individuals who regularly use urinary catheters to understand health insurance coverage and out-of-pocket costs they experience to advocate for health-policy change.MethodsSurvey content was generated by non-profit organizations and programmed into Qualtrics. It was distributed in Spanish and English via email and social media accounts. The survey was open from 1/19/21-2/15/21 and only included individuals who either used catheters themselves or were the care partner of an individual who used catheters. For non-normally distributed data, log-transformed confidence intervals were used to achieve approximately normal distributions; data was then transformed to be analyzed using an approximate 95% confidence interval (CI), and a Mann-Whitney U test was completed to test the equality of medians between groups. Associations between catheter types and out-of-pocket costs were performed using the Kruskal-Wallace non-parametric test.ResultsOne thousand two hundred and forty seven individuals responded. An equal percentage (43%) of catheter users were covered by public/government or private insurance plans only; 14% had both. Among those with public/government insurance, 8% reported their insurance did not cover any catheter costs versus 17% of those with private insurance. The median yearly out-of-pocket costs for privately insured respondents who paid anything was $1200 compared to $540 for those with public/government insurance.ConclusionOut-of-pocket expenses for catheters vary. Those with public/government insurance pay less out-of-pocket.