Out-of-Pocket Costs for Some Cancer Patients Top $700 Monthly

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http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2011/06/06/out-of-pocket-costs-for-some-cancer-patients-top-700-monthly/

The cost of cancer treatment is high and, according to the National Cancer Institute, growing. And at the individual level, the financial burden can be very heavy, even for patients with insurance.

A new study from Duke University Medical Center and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute covers 216 cancer patients, mostly older females with breast cancer. It found their self-reported, out-of-pocket, cancer-related costs averaged $712 a month. Some 30% of respondents said their expenses were a “significant burden” and 11% called them a “catastrophic problem.”

All but one of those surveyed had insurance, mostly Medicare, and 83% had prescription-drug coverage.

There are some caveats to the findings. Most of the patients found their way to the study via the HealthWell Foundation, a nonprofit group that provides financial assistance for out-of-pocket health-care costs, mostly prescription-related. (The rest of the study participants were being treated at Duke.) Most of the study participants had a household income of less than $40,000.

So the findings may not represent the experience of all cancer patients.

But study lead author Yousuf Zafar, an assistant professor of medicine at Duke, tells the Health Blog the findings do reflect the plight of the “underinsured” cancer patient. As the WSJ’s Laura Landro wrote in an Informed Patient column on this topic, about 25 million people are considered to fall into this category, meaning they have insurance but it doesn’t cover all their medical needs, leaving them with high out-of-pocket costs.

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1. knr for the underinsured. n/t