The Cost of Cancer Part 2

 

Here are links to two articles that address the high cost of cancer treatment. But costs like this are not limited to cancer. Twenty-five years ago I had a friend who was dealing with kidney damage resulting from diabetes and who was being charged $4,000.00 per month for one of her meds.  The most common reason cited for these prices is that the manufacturers must be able to recover their costs of research and development.  But I don’t think that it is quite that simple. 

In this short article from Medline Plus, the author points out that nearly two-thirds of all personal bankruptcy filings are due to medical debt. That’s astounding!  We’re not talking about a bunch of spendthrift deadbeats here.  These are people who are doing their best to cope with a serious, perhaps deadly, disease.  It is a also a call for physicians to begin to tackle the sensitive topic of cost with their patients.  Between physician reluctance, and a patient’s possible embarrassment, that won’t happen overnight. 

This longer article from New York Magazine takes a deeper look into the cost issues and it really blew my mind.  It begins by discussing a newly approved cancer drug that can increase life expectancy by 42 days. 42 days! Six weeks! This new drug provides exactly the same results as another drug that’s been available for some time but is twice as expensive as the older equally effective drug.  Using the new drug, the cost of an additional 42 days of life could be as much as $75,000.00. 

Oncologists were initially aghast at the idea that they consider cost when prescribing treatment.   

This whole thing has raised so many questions in my mind that I’m not sure where to begin. 

I guess the most important one to me is quality of life.  Knowing what my Dad went through during the last 6 weeks of his life, I suspect that adding another 6 weeks would have been a hideous punishment. How do we make these decisions?  Are our physicians capable of dealing with these issues?  Everyone’s situation is different, but I’d like to think that I’d opt for quality over quantity.   

What about oncologists and other medical specialists? Are they too focused on the disease to consider the whole patient?  Is it a matter of ego?  “My treatment was successful.  The fact that the patient is now bankrupt and/or homeless does not detract from the results of treatment.”  Yeah, I know that’s probably an exaggeration, but I’m ticked off.  There seems to be a grandiose Ivory Tower mind-set that deems only the technical details of treatment worthy of discussion. Will that ever change? 

Ok, I’m off this soapbox for now.  Sorry if this was rambling and incoherent but I wanted to get it off my chest.