In less than a year, new Medicaid eligibility restrictions may lead millions of people to lose coverage and then miss potentially lifesaving cancer screenings like colonoscopies or mammograms. A new analysis estimates that Americans may miss more than a million cancer screenings for colorectal, breast, or lung cancer over the two years after the new policy takes effect.

“I see patients every day that come to me with cancer and are asymptomatic, but their life gets turned upside down because they are told they have cancer,” said Adrian Diaz, a surgical oncologist at the University of Chicago and one of the authors on the paper, published Thursday in JAMA Oncology. “In a positive way, we catch it early. It’s potentially treatable, curable. Seeing that number, over a million patients, who will not have that opportunity — I was taken aback.”

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