Amy J. Davidoff, PhD, on Racial Disparities in Time to Cancer Treatment: The Effect of Medicaid Expansion
2019 ASCO Annual Meeting
Amy J. Davidoff, PhD, of Yale University School of Public Health, discusses study findings on how expanding access to Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) reduced racial disparities among patients with advanced cancer. Before the ACA was implemented in 2014, black patients with cancer were less likely than white patients to receive timely treatment, but in states that did not adopt Medicaid expansion, racial disparities persist (Abstract LBA1).
Alok A. Khorana, MD, of the Cleveland Clinic, and Hedy L. Kindler, MD, of The University of Chicago, discuss phase III findings on olaparib as maintenance treatment following first-line platinum-based chemotherapy in patients with metastatic pancreatic cancer and a germline BRCA mutation (Abstract LBA4).
Sara A. Hurvitz, MD, of the David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California Los Angeles, discusses 3-year outcomes from the first phase III study to test a non-conventional regimen for the neoadjuvant and adjuvant treatment of HER2-positive breast cancer (Abstract 500).
Neeraj Agarwal, MD, of the Huntsman Cancer Institute, and Arnaud Méjean, MD, PhD, of the Hôpital Européen Georges-Pompidou, Paris Descartes University, discuss an update to the CARMENA trial with new phase III study results on the benefit of cytoreductive nephrectomy followed by sunitinib vs sunitinib alone in metastatic renal cell carcinoma (Abstract 4508).
Kamal Chamoun, MD, of University Hospitals Seidman Cancer Center, discusses how better insurance coverage determines not only the ability of patients with multiple myeloma to afford high-priced oral medications, but their survival of the disease (Abstract LBA107).
Sagar Lonial, MD, of Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University, discusses the potentially practice-changing phase III findings showing that lenalidomide substantially delayed progression of smoldering multiple myeloma to aggressive disease when compared with observation alone (Abstract 8001).
