The use and cost of cancer-battling drugs skyrocketed despite an attempt by Medicare to control and rein in drug costs.
A research team led by Mark Hornbrook, Kaiser Permanente Northwest, Portland, Oregon, studied thousands of patient records between 2003 and 2006. Their aim: to see if the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 — reducing reimbursements for various cancer treatment drugs — had any dampening effect on drug treatments.
Their overall finding: most of the drugs have been prescribed almost as often as before the law was passed, and the cost of treating those patients has gone through the roof. The report appears in the latest issue of The Journal of Clinical Oncology.
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"Changes in reimbursement after the passage of [the law] appear to have had less of an impact on prescribing patterns in fee-for-service settings than the introduction of new drugs and clinical evidence as well as other factors driving adoption of new practice patterns," the study said.
In other words, for several forms of cancer, doctors continued to recommend the same drug treatment regimen before and after the reimbursement policy changed. Particularly in the fee-for-service realm, very little changed, and the cost of treatment continued to increase.
The total cost of cancer care increased by as much as 60 percent between 2003 and 2013, the study reported.
"Economists expected a sharp decline in use of the most expensive drugs targeted by the law, because reimbursement to oncologists for these drugs was reduced, but that did not happen," Hornbrook said.
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Dan Cook
Dan Cook is a journalist and communications consultant based in Portland, OR. During his journalism career he has been a reporter and editor for a variety of media companies, including American Lawyer Media, BusinessWeek, Newhouse Newspapers, Knight-Ridder, Time Inc., and Reuters. He specializes in health care and insurance related coverage for BenefitsPRO.
