Health Services and Economics Branch, Applied Research Program, Division of Cancer Control and Population Sciences, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, MD 20892-7344, USA. joan_warren@nih.gov
Both the United States and Canada offer government-financed health insurance for the elderly, but few studies have compared care at the end of life for cancer patients between the two systems.
We identified care for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients who died of cancer at age 65 years and older during 1999-2003. Patients were identified from US Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER)-Medicare data (N = 13,533) and the Ontario Cancer Registry (N = 8100). Health claims during the last 5 months of life identified chemotherapy and emergency room use, hospitalizations, and supportive care. We estimated rates per person-months (PM) for short-term survivors (died