Reports from Medical University of South Carolina Advance Knowledge in Cancer (Cancer Outcomes Among Medicare Beneficiaries and Their Younger Uninsured Counterparts)

2021 JUN 24 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Health Policy and Law Daily -- Investigators discuss new findings in Cancer. According to news reporting originating from Charleston, South Carolina, by NewsRx correspondents, research stated, “Proposals for expanding Medicare insurance coverage to uninsured Americans approaching the Medicare eligibility age of sixty-five has been the subject of intense debate. We undertook this study to assess cancer survival differences between uninsured patients younger than age sixty-five and older Medicare beneficiaries by using data from the National Cancer Database from the period 2004-16.”

Our news editors obtained a quote from the research from the Medical University of South Carolina, “The main outcomes were survival at one, two, and five years for sixteen cancer types in 1,206,821 patients. We found that uninsured patients ages 60-64 were nearly twice as likely to present with late-stage disease and were significantly less likely to receive surgery, chemotherapy, or radiotherapy than Medicare beneficiaries ages 66-69, despite lower comorbidity among younger patients. Compared with older Medicare patients, younger uninsured patients had strikingly lower five-year survival across cancer types. For instance, five-year survival in younger uninsured patients with late-stage breast or prostate cancer was 5-17 percent lower than that among older Medicare patients. We conclude that survival after a diagnosis of cancer is considerably lower in younger uninsured patients than in older Medicare patients.”

According to the news editors, the research concluded: “Expanding comprehensive health insurance coverage to people approaching Medicare age eligibility may improve cancer outcomes in the US.”

This research has been peer-reviewed.

For more information on this research see: Cancer Outcomes Among Medicare Beneficiaries and Their Younger Uninsured Counterparts. Health Affairs, 2021;40(5):754-762. Health Affairs can be contacted at: Project Hope, 7500 Old Georgetown Rd, Ste 600, Bethesda, MD 20814-6133, USA.

The news editors report that additional information may be obtained by contacting Gerard A. Silvestri, Medical University of South Carolina, Dept. of Medicine, Division of Pulmonary & Critical Care Medicine, Thorac Oncol, Charleston, SC 29425, United States. Additional authors for this research include Ahmedin Jemal, K. Robin Yabroff, Stacey Fedewa and Helmneh Sineshaw.

The direct object identifier (DOI) for that additional information is: https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2020.01839. This DOI is a link to an online electronic document that is either free or for purchase, and can be your direct source for a journal article and its citation.

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