Financial Burden of Cancer Care

The national cancer-attributed medical care costs in the United States are substantial and projected to increase due to population changes alone, according to the Medical Care Costs Associated with Cancer Survivorship in the United States article, published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention (1). National costs for cancer care were estimated to be $190.2 billion in 2015. Assuming constant future costs, we project costs to be $208.9 billion in 2020 (2020 U.S. dollars), an increase of 10 percent that is only due to the aging and growth of the U.S. population. These cost estimates include cancer-attributable costs for medical services and oral prescription drugs. National medical services costs were largest for those diagnosed with female breast, colorectal, lung, and prostate cancers and non-Hodgkin lymphomas. National oral prescription drug costs were highest for those diagnosed with female breast, leukemia, lung, and prostate cancers. The differences in national costs reflect prevalence of the disease, treatment patterns, and costs for different types of care for the different cancer sites.

If cancer diagnosis and treatment is divided into phases of care: initial (first year after diagnosis), end-of-life (year before cancer death) and continuing (the time in between), per-patient annualized average costs were highest in the last year of life, followed by the initial and continuing phases (medical services: $109,727, $43,516, and $5,518, and oral prescription drugs: $4,372, $1,874, $1,041, respectively). There was considerable variation in costs by cancer site. Annualized average oral drug costs were highest for chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) and myeloma in all phases of care. Annualized average costs also varied by stage in all phases of care [data is not shown here but is available in Mariotto, et al. (1)].