The cost of breast cancer

There was an interesting story on CNN recently about the number of times that terminal patients were given “straight talk” by their doctors of the severity of their situation and end of life care options. The impetus for this story was a study led by Dana Farber Cancer Institute that followed 603 terminally ill cancer patients with life expectancies of less than a year. The conclusion: only about a third of the patients had a discussion with their doctor about their end of life care options.

A survey of the Medicare costs for treating cancer, published in the June 10 online edition of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, looked at the costs of treating various types of cancer, including breast, lung, colorectal and prostate cancer between 1991 and 2002. They found that treatment costs had increased for most types of cancer. The cost of the average breast cancer treatment, for example, rose by $4,189. Since the study only went through 2002, many new but expensive drugs weren’t included in the figures.

Young women diagnosed with breast cancer have many more issues facing them than just getting through their cancer experience and minimizing their chance of a recurrence. Often the treatment choices they are presented with have tradeoffs involving the likelihood that they will ever be able to have and/or add to their families.

So asks a recent Wall Street Journal article (subscription required for link) that tells the story of a leukemia patient who was asked to pay $105,000 before beginning her treatments at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. M.D. Anderson is a world renowned cancer center that is part of the University of Texas.

I’ve blogged before about the correlation between high co-pays for mammograms and the increasing incidences of breast cancer due to lower incidences of preventive screening. This article points out that it is medically unsound, financially irresponsible and even morally wrong to force mammograms to be thought of as a discretionary expense, especially for lower/fixed income women.