“Our results provide evidence for policymakers considering legislative or regulatory solutions to address insufficient screening adherence and highlight an understudied benefit of expanding paid sick leave coverage,” wrote authors who were led by Kevin Callison, PhD, of the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, New Orleans.
The findings were published earlier this year in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Despite an Affordable Care Act provision eliminating most cost-sharing for cancer screening, the rate for recommended breast and colorectal cancer screening among U.S. adults is lower than 70%. Work commitments, time constraints, and the prospect of lost wages are frequently cited as contributing factors to this underuse of preventive care. Researchers hypothesized that having paid sick leave coverage for the use of preventive services could improve adherence to cancer screening guidelines. With continued failure to pass a bill mandating federal paid sick leave legislation, nearly 30% of the nation’s workforce lacks this coverage. Rates are lower for low-income workers, women, and underserved racial and ethnic groups, the authors write.
Coverage mandates have become politically contentious, as evidenced by the fact that their passage by some states (n = 17), counties (n = 4) and cities (n = 18) has been met by many states (n = 18) passing preemption laws banning municipalities from adopting the laws.
In this study, researchers examined the rate of colorectal and breast cancer screening at 12- and 24-month intervals among people living in one of 61 cities. Before paid sick leave mandates were put in place, cancer screening rates were similar across the board. But once mandates were put in place, cancer screening rates were higher among workers affected by the mandate by 1.31% (95% confidence interval, 0.28-2.34) for 12-month colorectal cancer screening, 1.56% (95% CI, 0.33-2.79) for 24-month colorectal cancer screening, 1.22% (95% CI, −0.20 to 2.64) for 12-month mammography, and 2.07% (95% CI, 0.15-3.99) for 24-month mammography.
“Although these appear to be modest effects, spread across a large population, these indicate a fairly substantial gain in cancer screenings,” Dr. Callison said.
Prior studies showing positive associations between having paid sick leave coverage and whether someone receives cancer screenings are likely confounded by selection bias because they compare workers who have such coverage to those who do not, Dr. Callison and colleagues state in their paper.
“Although the lack of paid sick leave coverage may hinder access to preventive care, current evidence is insufficient to draw meaningful conclusions about its relationship to cancer screening,” the authors write, citing that particularly health conscious workers may take jobs offering sick leave coverage.
Through quasi-experimental design, the present study aimed to overcome such confounding issues. Its analytic sample, using administrative data from the Merative MarketScan Research Databases, encompassed approximately 2.5 million person-specific records per year for the colorectal cancer screening sample. The researchers’ mammography sample included 1.3 million person-specific records per year of the period examined.
The associations cited above translate into relative colorectal cancer screening increases of 8.1% in the 12-month adjusted model and a 5.9% relative increase from the premandate rate in the 24-month adjusted model. The rate was 1.56 percentage points (95% CI, 0.33-2.79) higher in the cities subject to the paid sick leave mandates (a 5.9% relative increase from the premandate rate). For screening mammography in the cities subject to the mandates, the 12-month adjusted 1.22% increase (95% CI, –0.20 to 2.64) represented a 2.5% relative increase from the premandate level. The adjusted 24-month rate increase of 2.07% (95% CI, 0.15-4.00) represented a 3.3% relative increase from premandate rates.
“However, these estimates are averages across all workers in our sample, many of whom likely already had paid sick leave coverage prior to the enactment of a mandate,” Dr. Callison said in the interview. “In fact, in other work related to this project, we estimated that about 28% of private sector workers gain paid sick leave when a mandate is enacted. So then, if we scale our findings by the share of workers actually gaining paid sick leave coverage, our estimates are much larger – a 9%-12% increase in screening mammography and a 21%-29% increase in colorectal cancer screening.”
Dr. Callison and his team are in the process of developing a follow-up proposal that would examine the effects of paid sick leave on downstream outcomes of the cancer care continuum, such as timing from diagnosis to treatment initiation. “We also hope to examine who benefits from these additional screens and what they mean for health equity. Data limitations prevented us from exploring that issue in the current study,” he said.
Dr. Callison had no conflicts associated with this study.