The association between affordable care act implementation and the prevalence of women having ever received a Pap smear.

Background: To assess if implementation of the 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) was associated with changes in the prevalence of women having ever received a pap smear.

Methods: This study utilised the publicly available Centre for Disease Control National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) data set. This was a serial cross-sectional study. The comparison groups were defined as women who received cancer screening and prevention interventions prior to full implementation of the ACA (2011-2013) and post full implementation (2017-2019). The primary outcome was self-reporting receipt of a Papanicolaou (Pap) smear. Secondary outcomes included HPV vaccination and mammogram rates. Anonymized patient information was collected from the nationally representative dataset, and analyses were performed utilising STATA 18.

Results: The two study cohorts obtained from the NSFG included women who responded in 2011-2013 (n = 5601), deemed to be 'Pre-ACA implementation' (Pre ACA), and those who responded in 2017-2019 (n = 6141) 'Post-ACA implementation' (Post ACA). The proportion of women who were 21 years and older and ever had a Pap smear in the Pre ACA group (96.0%) was higher than that of the Post ACA group (94.1%) (OR 0.66 (0.49-0.91)). In contrast, HPV vaccination rates rose, and mammogram rates remained stable in the Post ACA period.

Conclusion: A decrease in proportion of women ever having had a Pap smear despite implementation of health policies to increase access to preventive measures suggests further interventions to improve access to cervical cancer screening are warranted.