Cancer care is big business. The estimated cost of cancer care is around $250 billion a year. Not all of this is actual care, some is for screening. A new study in The Annals of Internal Medicine, finds that screening for just five cancers (breast, cervical, colorectal, lung and prostate cancers) costs roughly $43 billion a year. Nearly $38 billion is paid for by private insurers, while about $5 billion is paid by government programs.
Considering the analysis only focused on five relatively common cancers, $43 billion underestimates the total. It’s a grisly calculus but there is an optimal amount of spending on cancer screenings, but experts often do not agree on the amount.
[T]he American Cancer Society, the value of screening for the cancers is clear. “We are talking about people’s lives,” she said. “Early detection allows a better chance of survival. Full stop. It’s the right thing to do for individuals.”
“We screen for cancer because it works,” Dr. Knudsen added. “The cost is small compared to the cost of being diagnosed with late-stage disease.”
Others are not so sure. Some experts believe much of the money spent on cancer screening could be better used in other areas of care.
Critics of the current amount of screening said the large price tag researchers documented for screening wasn’t worth the cost.
Other researchers say the finding supports their contentions that screening is overused, adding that there is a weak link between early detection and cancer survival and that the money invested in cancer testing is not being well spent.
Colonoscopies account for about 55% of the total, or nearly $24 billion. There are other, cheaper methods to detect colon cancer, but advocates point out that colonoscopies not only detect colon cancer but also prevent it. One paradox of cancer screening is that many of those screened are unlikely to benefit, while many who could benefit are not getting screened.
While some public health advocates say cancer screening is “settled science,” others suggest it could be more efficient. What is the appropriate amount of screening? That’s a normative question. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” is an old saying attributed to Benjamin Franklin. Yet, quantifying the benefit of cancer screening is more complex. The answer will vary from individual to individual. One problem is that the cost of care prevented is hard to measure, while the cost of screening is easy to measure.
Think of it this way: preventive medical screenings are entirely wasted money on healthy people, other than the value of peace of mind. However, you won’t know it is money wasted until the test is done. Health plans must test hundreds of people to find that one person who has cancer. The other people didn’t have cancer. Thus, their tests were of no medical value.
There are firms working to bring tests to market that can test for many types of cancer from a blood draw. These will likely be very expensive until patents expire. To the degree the costs of cancer screening can be brought down it will pay to screen more people, earlier in their lives.
It should not come as a surprise that the cost of screenings is often wasteful. Every year I pay around $140 for a wellness lab screening. Quest Diagnostics tests numerous metrics of my health. Yet it treats nothing. Rather, it alerts my doctor that my cholesterol is a little too high and looks to see if anything else could signal health problems. I pay the cost out of pocket, and it is money well spent in my opinion. It’s not actually medical care, however. But, then again, that free annual wellness visit your health plan is required to provide is also not really medical care.
The subject of preventive care is interesting. Read more at: Study Puts a $43 Billion Yearly Price Tag on Cancer Screening – The New York Times
Re: “…preventive medical screenings are entirely wasted money on healthy people, other than the value of peace of mind. However, you won’t know it is money wasted until the test is done. ”
It seems to me that you could replace “preventive medical screening” in the above statement with “medical insurance” and “test” with “coverage period” and have a statement of equal utility. Of course, much of medical screening consists of measuring some indicator or metric that is itself of questionable value.