Delaying cancer treatment until after patients enroll in Medicaid results in poorer outcomes - these individuals are more likely to die of cancer, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

Medicaid, the joint federal and state health insurance plan for the poor, requires that beneficiaries have both a disabling condition and low income and assets.

People who meet these criteria are usually without insurance before they are diagnosed with cancer and are unlikely to have been screened early enough for treatment to do them much good, Cathy Bradley of Michigan State University and colleagues report in the latest issue of the journal Cancer.

They reviewed the records of 13,740 people from the Michigan Tumor Registry, a record of Michigan residents with cancer.

The investigators found that patients enrolled in Medicaid after their cancer diagnosis had a significantly poorer survival rate compared with patients already enrolled in Medicaid at the time of diagnosis and compared with non-Medicaid patients.

The median survival was 18 months for those diagnosed before enrollment compared with 38 months for those diagnosed while on Medicaid.

“From a policy perspective, cancer survival in the Medicaid population cannot be improved as long as 40 percent of the population enrolls in Medicaid after diagnosis with late-stage disease,” Bradley’s team writes. “Care provided to these individuals may be futile.”