Medicaid expansion may improve outcomes for children with cancer, according to a new analysis.

Researchers found there was a 1.5% increase in overall survival of children with cancer after 2014 in states that expanded access to Medicaid compared with states that did not.

“While 1.5% may not seem like much, we often frame it in terms of number of individual lives who are saved as a result of the program,” says Kimberly Johnson, associate professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis and co-senior author of the paper in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

“Although the relative increase was small, it translates to an additional 200 children alive at two years following their cancer diagnosis,” the authors write.

Johnson and her coauthors, including lead author Justin Barnes, a resident in the radiation oncology department at the School of Medicine, analyzed data for children ages birth through 14 years diagnosed with cancer from 2011 to 2018 from 40 states as part of the US Centers for Disease Control’s National Program of Cancer Registries.

Read the full article about Medicaid expansion by Neil Schoenherr at Futurity.