Cancer Treatment costs aren't rising as fast as thought

Over the last decade, the cost to treat cancer patients has grown at roughly the same rate as all health care spending. Medicare patients who were actively treating their cancer, meaning they had one or more claims for chemotherapy, radiation therapy, or cancer surgery in a given year, saw their health care costs grow 36.4% over an 11 year period. Costs for the non-cancer group grew by 34.8%. The same was true for those with commercial insurance plans. Non-cancer patients saw a 60.8% jump in health care costs, while the actively-treated cancer population’s costs rose 62.5%. Health care spending has grown steadily over the past decade, jumping 5.5% in 2014 alone, and is now equal to about 19.6% of the U.S. economy. Drug spending accounted for one-fifth of the total costs in actively-treated cancer patients in 2014 and has seen the highest growth over the study period. A large part of that is due to better biologic drugs and breakthrough therapies that have entered the market in recent years.
The study also found that patients are receiving a greater share of chemotherapy infusions in a hospital setting rather than a physician’s office, which has a dramatic effect on costs. The proportion of chemotherapy infusions delivered in hospital outpatient departments nearly tripled for Medicare patients and grew almost eight-fold for those with private insurance. The additional cost per patient reached as high as $46,272 in 2014.