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).
Matteo Lambertini, MD, PhD, of the University of Genova and Policlinico San Martino Hospital, and Hope S. Rugo, MD, of the University of California, San Francisco, discuss findings from the SOPHIA trial on margetuximab plus chemotherapy vs trastuzumab plus chemotherapy in patients with HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer after prior anti-HER2 therapies (Abstract 1000).
Christopher Sweeney, MBBS, of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and Ian D. Davis, MBBS, PhD, of Monash University and Eastern Health, discuss the Australian and New Zealand Urogenital and Prostate Cancer Trials Group, working globally to speed clinical research in and treatment of urogenital cancers.
Edward B. Garon, MD, of the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles, discusses long-term survival data on patients with advanced non–small cell lung cancer treated with pembrolizumab and those with PD-L1 expressed in at least half of their tumor cells (Abstract LBA9015).
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).
Michael A. Thompson, MD, PhD, of Advocate Aurora Health, discusses the implications of the revised diagnostic criteria for multiple myeloma, which removed patients at the highest risk of disease progression from the smoldering group, and a new model for smoldering disease that incorporates revised cutoffs for the previously used parameters (Abstract 8000).
