What is they key driver of cancer care spending?

High-cost cancer drugs often get bad press. Cancer treatment certainly is expensive. However, drug costs are not the primary driver of high cost of cancer treatment; hospitalizations are. Using data from SEER-Medicare, Brooks et al. (2014) examine regional variation in the cost of cancer care and find: Acute hospital care was the largest component of…

Cancer Care Myths

Below are excerpts from a recent Health Affairs paper by Goldman and Philipson (2014): Myth #1: The War on Cancer has been a failure.  Survival rates for all cancers increased by almost four years during the period 1988–2000. Myth 2: Detection, Not Treatment, Accounts For Most Of The Survival Gains.  During 1988–2000 almost 80 percent of…

Benefits of mammogram oversold?

That is what one new study finds. The Boston Globe reports that: Doctors may have oversold the benefits of mammography and underplayed its risks, which has left many women unable to make an informed decision about whether or not to have regular breast cancer screenings beginning at age 40. That troubling finding is based on…

Cancer Tidal Wave

People are living longer. That is good news. The bad news is that when you decrease the mortality rates for some diseases, you increase the likelihood that you die from other ones. For instance, if someone previously would have died of a heart attack at 50 year old in 1950, if that same person turned…

Access to Oncology Care

Oftentimes, health services research measure access as the distance between a patient and the nearest provider of a given type (e.g., hospital, physician).  This issue of access is particularly relevant for individuals with cancer, since cancer care typically requires supervisions from specialist oncologists.  In most cases, health services researchers assume that individuals located far from…

Cost of Cancer in Europe

In 2008, 2.45 million people were diagnosed with cancer and 1.23 million died because of cancer in the European Union (EU). What is the economic burden of cancer?  A paper by Luengo-Fernandez (2013) aims to estimate just this quantity.  They find that: Cancer cost the EU €126 billion in 2009…Across the EU, the health-care costs…