Impact of health insurance (HI) on outcomes in patients with advanced (adv) NSCLC.

e18048 Background: HI status has been shown to impact outcomes in breast and colon cancers as well as use of surgery and radiation in earlier stages of NSCLC. Information on impact of HI upon patterns of care in adv NSCLC is scant. We examined the relationship of HI with use of chemotherapy (CH), targeted therapy (TT), clinical trial enrollment (CTE) and overall survival (OS) in patients (pts) with adv NSCLC in a single institution retrospective cohort. Methods: Pts with diagnosis of stage IIIB/ IV (adv) NSCLC were identified from tumor registry after approval by the IRB. Information on HI status, age, sex, histology, stage, performance status (PS), wt loss, serum albumin level, use of CH, TT and dates of diagnosis and death were collected. Three HI categories were defined: Medicaid only (MD) includes uninsured pts; Medicare (MC) includes supplemental HI; and private insurance (PI). OS was estimated with Kaplan Meier method and compared with log rank test. Cox regression was used to determine simultaneous...