The cost of care for patients with the 15 most prevalent types of cancer came to just over $156 billion in 2018, according to new findings.
While healthcare costs overall have continued to rise over the years, the trend is especially pronounced for cancer care. The price tags for oncology drugs, in particular, have skyrocketed, with some costing more than $1 million per patient per year.
Despite these trends, estimates of resources and spending devoted to cancer care in the United States for privately insured patients remain limited.
To better understand the most common and costly services, Nicholas Zaorsky, MD, assistant professor, Departments of Radiation Oncology and Public Health Sciences at the Penn State College of Medicine, and researcher at Penn State Cancer Institute, Hershey, and colleagues, analyzed data from MarketScan, a large private insurance database.
With Medicaid and private insurance covering an increasing portion of cancer costs, "our study helps to highlight the areas that may be most likely to be associated with this increase in spending," the authors write.
The results were published online October 6 in JAMA Network Open.
The analysis, which included data from 402,115 privately insured patients under age 65 with the 15 most common cancer types, found the total estimated cost of cancer care in 2018 came to $156.2 billion.
