The Medicaid expansion under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act resulted in a 19% annual increase in Medicaid-insured cancer patients participating in publicly funded clinical trials, according to researchers from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, the SWOG Statistics and Data Management Center and Columbia University.
How’s this for a paradox: The better cancer centers become at keeping patients alive, the more expensive cancer care becomes. This brutal tradeoff hits harder in rural areas, where the cancer burden is higher and the investigator and clinical trial representation is lower.
