Washington Cancer Patients Found To Be At Greater Risk For Bankruptcy Than People Without A Cancer Diagnosis
By Scott D. Ramsey, David K. Blough, A. Kirchhoff, Catherine Fedorenko, K. Snell, Karma Kreizenbeck, P. Newcomb, W. Hollingworth, Karen A. Overstreet. Health Affairs, 2013
673 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Much has been written about the relationship between a person’s high medical expenses and his or her likelihood of filing for bankruptcy, but the relationship between receiving a cancer diagnosis and filing for bankruptcy is less well understood. We estimated the incidence and relative risk of bankruptcy for people age twenty-one or older diagnosed with cancer compared to people the same age without cancer by conducting a retrospective cohort analysis that used a variety of medical, personal, legal, and bankruptcy sources covering the Western District of Washington State in US Bankruptcy Court for the period 1995–2009. We found that cancer patients were 2.65 times more likely to go bankrupt than people without cancer. Younger cancer patients had 2–5 times higher rates of bankruptcy compared to cancer patients age sixty-five or older, indicating that Medicare insurance and Social Security may mitigate bankruptcy risk for the older group. The findings suggest that employers and governments may have a policy role to play in creating programs and incentives that could help people cover expenses in the first year following a cancer diagnosis.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, General Health Professions
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7658ad197accb60dd2795ce38c167275158a73ff
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Citations in the corpus
- The Financial Burden and Distress of Patients with Cancer: Understanding and Stepping-Up Action on the Financial Toxicity of Cancer Treatment (2018, background): “65 times greater risk of declaring personal bankruptcy than those without cancer.(58)”
- Delivering High-Quality Cancer Care: Charting a New Course for a System in Crisis (2014, background): “Cancer patients, especially those under 65 years, have a higher bankruptcy rate compared to people who do not have cancer (Ramsey et al., 2013).”
- Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer, 1975–2014, Featuring Survival (2017, background): “The high cost of cancer treatment dubbed “financial toxicity”(110) has been associated with reduced spending on groceries and clothing, skipped medications and physician appointments to save money, bankruptcy, and mortality (111,112).”
- Financial Insolvency as a Risk Factor for Early Mortality Among Patients With Cancer. (2016, methodology): “Details of our approach to determining bankruptcy incidence among patients with cancer are available in Ramsey et al.1 To assess the association between bankruptcy filing and mortality, we used Cox regression models on a propensity score matched sample.”