Like a lot of senior citizens, my mother relies on Medicare coverage. She was also recently diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer.

The infuriating part? My mother is a retired oncology nurse — she spent 27 years caring for cancer patients, and so she’d been fanatic about keeping up with her own physicals, cancer screenings and routine colonoscopies. Last July she’d had her gallbladder removed, and two months previously she’d had her appendix removed.

The “slow-growing” tumor was located precisely beneath where her appendix used to be. The doctor who missed it says he doesn’t know why he didn’t see the lemon-sized tumor during either surgery.

But, if today’s NY Times is to be believed, the failure to diagnose her cancer may be tied to her health insurance.

Previous studies have shown a correlation between insurance status and the stage of diagnosis for particular cancers. The new research is the first to examine a dozen major cancer types and to do so nationally with the most current data. It mined the National Cancer Data Base, which began collecting information about insurance in the late 1990s, to analyze 3.7 million patients who received diagnoses from 1998 to 2004.

The widest disparities were noted in cancers that could be detected early through standard screening or assessment of symptoms, like breast cancer, lung cancer, colon cancer and melanoma. For each, uninsured patients were two to three times more likely to be diagnosed in Stage III or Stage IV rather than Stage I. Smaller disparities were found for non-Hodgkins lymphoma and cancers of the bladder, kidney, prostate, thyroid, uterus, ovary and pancreas.

The study concludes that people without private health insurance are less likely to received routine screenings and timely diagnosis, and there’s a suggestion that such omissions are due to efforts to control health care costs. Ironically enough, a late stage diagnosis requires more aggressive treatment and critical care, ultimately increasing overall costs anyway.

Tags: cancer diagnosis, colon cancer, health insurance, medicare, uninsured