Medicaid expansion tied to larger increases in cancer screening rates

A new study from the American Cancer Society finds that states that expanded Medicaid access soon after the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 had higher rates of cancer screening than states that waited to expand or didn’t at all. States like California that expanded Medicaid within a year after the ACA saw an average of nearly 9% increase in preventive screening for colorectal cancer and a 5% increase in screening for breast cancer. For the 19 states that didn’t expand Medicaid, screenings increased about 4% for each of the two cancer types. The rates for those states were comparable to the screening rates in states that expanded Medicaid after 2015, however, which the authors say may be because large-scale cancer screening takes several years to become routine following a widening of health care access.