Medicare Costs Soar for Cancer Care

Expenditures will continue to rise as the population ages, experts say

By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter

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TUESDAY, April 29 (HealthDay News) -- Treating elderly cancer patients for five years costs Medicare $21.1 billion, and these costs are expected to increase dramatically as the population ages, a new study says.

The costs for treating patients varies by type of cancer, with expenditures highest for lung, colorectal and prostate tumors, said the researchers, who based their estimates on patients diagnosed with cancer in 2004.

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"Because the U.S. population is aging and growing, we think that these costs are going to get higher in the future," said lead researcher Robin Yabroff, an epidemiologist at the U.S. National Cancer Institute. "We think there are going to be a lot more cancer patients in the future."

"The main goal of this study," Yabroff added, "was to provide cost of care estimates that could be useful for policy makers and health planners and researchers that might want to do cost-effectiveness analyses."

The findings are published in the April 29 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

For the study, Yabroff's team estimated the cost of cancer care among 718,907 cancer patients and compared that to 1,623,651 people without cancer. The researchers used data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) and SEER-linked Medicare files to identify these patients.

The researchers then subtracted Medicare costs for people without cancer from costs among those with cancer. The resulting number was the estimated cost of cancer care per person.

Costs varied over five years from about $20,000 for people with breast cancer or melanoma to $40,000 for people with lymphoma, brain or other cancers of the nervous system, as well as malignancies of the esophagus, ovaries or stomach.

The study authors found that costs were highest during the first year of treatment and also during the last year of life. Patients are more likely to be hospitalized during the last year of life, which increases costs, Yabroff said.

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