Responses by Breast and Prostate Cancer Patients to Out-Of-Pocket Costs in Newfoundland and Labrador
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: Cancer patients face substantial care-related out-of-pocket (oop) costs that may influence treatment decisions, attitudes, and use of drug- or appointment-related cost-saving strategies. We examined the relationship between oop costs and care-related responses by patients. METHODS: We surveyed 170 prostate and 131 breast cancer patients presenting at clinics or support groups, or listed on the cancer registry in Newfoundland and Labrador. RESULTS: In the 3-month period before the survey, 18.8% of prostate and 25.2% of breast cancer patients had oop costs greater than $500. Those oop costs consumed more than 7.5% of quarterly household income for 15.9% of prostate and 19.1% of breast cancer patients. Few patients (8.8% prostate, 15.3% breast) ever adopted any drug- or appointment-related cost-saving strategy. Few patients (7.2% prostate, 9.6% breast) said oop costs influenced treatment decisions, told their physicians about their oop costs (27.0% prostate, 21.1% breast), or were aware of available financial assistance programs (27.3% prostate, 36.9% breast). Compared with patients having low or moderate oop costs (22.9% prostate, 16.7% breast, and 25.7% prostate, 58.3% breast respectively), a larger proportion of prostate (56.0%) and breast (58.3%) cancer patients with high oop costs said that those costs created stress. Among prostate cancer patients, a larger proportion of those having high oop costs (compared with low or moderate costs) used drug-related (22.2% vs. 3.3% and 9.6% respectively) and appointment-related (11.1% vs. 1.1% and 3.8% respectively) cost-saving strategies, said oop costs created an unusual amount of stress (48.0% vs. 18.4% and 10.4%), and had difficulty paying those costs (29.2% vs. 6.2% and 10.4%). CONCLUSIONS: For a small group of breast and prostate cancer patients, oop costs are high, but rarely lead to the use of care-related cost-saving strategies or influence care decisions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".