The American Cancer Society estimates that there will be almost 1.7 million new cancer cases in the United States this year, with just over 600,000 deaths from the disease. But securing specialized treatment could be tough for many patients who want to go to a facility designated by the National Cancer Institute, if they have a what is known as a “narrow-network” insurance plan. Many of those plans exclude doctors at those centers as well as doctors offering complex care for other diseases elsewhere. This news comes from research by the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. The study, recently published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology , was authored by Daniel Polsky, executive director of the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics and professor at the Perelman School, Laura Yasaitis, a post-doctoral researcher in health policy at the Perelman School, and Justin E. Bekelman, an oncologist and professor at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.…