Severe financial distress requiring bankruptcy protection after cancer diagnosis appears to be a risk factor for mortality. Further research is needed to understand the process by which extreme financial distress influences survival after cancer diagnosis and to find strategies that could mitigate this risk.

Much has been written about the relationship between a person’s high medical expenses and his or her likelihood of filing for bankruptcy, but the relationship between receiving a cancer diagnosis and filing for bankruptcy is less well understood. We estimated the incidence and relative risk of bankruptcy for people age twenty-one or older diagnosed with cancer compared to people the same age without cancer by conducting a retrospective cohort analysis that used a variety of medical, personal, legal, and bankruptcy sources covering the Western District of Washington State in US Bankruptcy Court for the period 1995–2009. We found that cancer patients were 2.65 times more likely to go bankrupt than people without cancer. Younger cancer patients had 2–5 times higher rates of bankruptcy compared to cancer patients age sixty-five or older, indicating that Medicare insurance and Social Security may mitigate bankruptcy risk for the older group. The findings suggest that employers and governments may have a policy role to play in creating programs and incentives that could help people cover expenses in the first year following a cancer diagnosis.