The effect of a cancer diagnosis on disability status
Bibliographic record
Abstract
6531 Background: Although cancer and cancer treatments may lead to an inability to work, working-age adults eligible for Medicare benefits on the basis of disability face a 29-month waiting period between initial application due to disability and enrollment in the program. In this study we evaluated patterns of Medicare enrollment for working-age adults with cancer and determined factors predicting enrollment. Methods: The Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) and SEER-Medicare data were used for this retrospective cohort analysis. We included patients age 21 to 59 diagnosed with lung, prostate, colorectal, and breast cancer (female) cases from 1992 through 2002. Patients were followed until 2005 or death. We constructed line plots of time from cancer diagnosis to enrollment in Medicare due to disability, anticipating a spike in enrollment around 29 months post-diagnosis. We compared demographic and tumor characteristics in the disabled to the all similarly aged patients included in SEER. We used logistic regression to determine factors associated with enrollment in Medicare due to disability 29 to 35 months post-diagnosis including demographic characteristics, stage at diagnosis, and type of surgical treatment. Results: We identified 359,049 working-age adults who were diagnosed with prostate, lung, colorectal, or female breast cancer. Within 5 years of diagnosis, 4.4% had enrolled in Medicare due to disability, most between 29 and 31 months post-diagnosis (the earliest time period of eligibility on the basis of cancer diagnosis). Later stage at diagnosis, lack of surgical treatment, aggressive surgical treatment, unmarried marital status, Hispanic or African American race/ethnicity, older age, and male gender were associated with statistically significantly higher odds of enrollment in Medicare due to disability. Conclusions: A significant number of working-age cancer patients become eligible for enrollment in Medicare due to disability. Most become eligible between 29 and 31 months after diagnosis indicating that cancer and/or treatment had a substantial permanent impact on ability to work from the time of diagnosis. Federal policy offering Medicare benefits only 29 months after application should be reevaluated. No significant financial relationships to disclose.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".