Annual cancer costs exceed $156 billion
Breast, lung, lymphoma and colorectal cancers are most expensive to treat.
New research indicates that care for the 15 most prevalent types of cancer in the United States cost approximately $156.2 billion in 2018. Medication was the top expense, with drugs for breast, lung, lymphoma and colorectal cancers incurring the most costs.
A team of researchers at the Penn State College of Medicine examined a database that included statistics on cancer care for 402,115 privately insured cancer patients in the United States under the age of 65 in an effort to better understand how money is spent on cancer care.
“The public often hears that the U.S. spends an inordinate amount of money on health care, but no one has quantified exactly how big that number is and how is that number broken down for exactly what types of services,” Dr. Nicolas Zaorsky, assistant professor from the Departments of Radiation Oncology and Public Health Sciences at the Penn State College of Medicine and a researcher at the Penn State Cancer Institute, said in a statement.
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“Cancer is … actually overtaking heart disease as the leading cause of death in the U.S. over the past few years,” he added. ”But it’s still unknown what we pay for in cancer care. As a team, we wanted to look at what private insurances are paying for each kind of cancer and for each type of service. We also wanted to look at what are the greatest number of services performed and how much does each one of those services cost.”
Zaorsky, who also is an associate of the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences at Penn State, added that this information traditionally has been difficult to track because the U.S. has different ways to cover health care costs, such as private insurance for people under 65 and Medicare for people over 65.
Researchers, who presented their findings in JAMA Network Open on Oct. 6, said their database included 38.4 million types of procedures for the 15 cancers (breast, prostate, colorectal, lung, lymphoma, melanoma, uterus, head and neck, bladder, kidney, thyroid, stomach, liver, pancreas and esophagus). The cohort study used 2018 data — the most recent complete numbers available — from the IBM Watson Health MarketScan. The sample included 27.1 million privately insured individuals, including patients diagnosed with the most prevalent cancers.
Breast cancer incurred the most services, followed by colorectal cancer. Breast cancer was also the most expensive type of cancer, costing a total of $3.4 billion, followed by lung cancer and colorectal cancer, which were both estimated to incur around $1.1 billion in costs. According to the researchers, about $4 billion were spent on drugs to treat cancer, which is double the $2 billion paid out for surgeries.
The study was not meant to assess whether the spending on drugs and services is cost-effective, although the findings do merit that discussion, according to Zaorsky.
“You might ask if these costs are justified,” he said. “For example, pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest cancers, but the total cost of care that we devote to pancreatic cancer is relatively low versus something like indolent prostate cancer.”
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