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Researchers led by Florence Tangka, a health economist at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, compared data from 1987 to that from 2001 to 2005. In 1987, the total cost of cancer care was $24.7 billion (in 2007 dollars), funded largely by private insurance (42 percent) and Medicare (33 percent). By 2001-2005, the cost of cancer had risen to $48.1 billion, in part becau...

The study confounds conventional wisdom in several respects. The soaring price of new cancer treatments has received widespread attention, but the researchers conclude that rising costs were mainly driven by the growing number of cancer patients. The study also finds cancer accounts for only 5 percent of total U.S. medical costs, and that has not changed in the last few decades. "I will say ...

"There has been a significant increase in the utilization of imaging services for cancer patients since 1999, especially advanced imaging services such as CAT scans, MRI and PET scans -- the most expensive studies," said lead researcher Dr. Kevin A. Schulman, a professor of medicine and business administration and associate director of the Duke Clinical Research Institute. Schulman note...

Pharmacy benefits manager Express Scripts Inc identified various behaviors including brand loyalty, procrastinating on refills and occasional forgetfulness, that increase treatment costs. "This is the first time we’ve looked at the behavioral factors that are driving spending," chief scientist Bob Nease commented about Express Scripts’ annual drug trends report. The cost of these beha...

Nearly 600 doctors were surveyed for the study to determine how aggressively they treat their patients and whether non-medical issues have influenced their decisions to order invasive heart tests. Most said they weren’t swayed by such things as financial gain or a patient’s expectations. But about 24 percent of the doctors said they had recommended the test in the previous year because the...

What’s more alarming is that the findings suggest these more challenging operations are riskier, leading to more complications and even deaths. "This is exactly what the health care debate has been dancing around," said Dr. Eugene Carragee of Stanford University Medical Center. "You have one kind of operation that could cost $20,000 and another that could cost $80,000 and there’s not goo...

The percentage of Americans with a "high financial burden for healthcare" rose to 19 percent in 2006 from 14 percent in 2001, according to the Washington-based Center for Studying Health System Change. The think tank defines a high out-of-pocket burden for healthcare as spending more than 10 percent of before-tax income on insurance premiums and medical care. "The basic finding was that o...

The study issued Wednesday by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and The Pew Charitable Trusts at Georgetown University ranks US states according to their total costs related to foodborne illness and individual cost per case -- an average of about 1,850 dollars. "The costs associated with foodborne illness are substantial," said report author Robert Scharff, a former FDA economist who no...

Food safety advocates are hoping the study will boost efforts in Congress to overhaul the nation’s antiquated food safety system that has seen consumer confidence plunge. In recent years, the food supply has been battered by a series of high-profile outbreaks, many involving produce, such as lettuce, spinach, peppers and peanuts, leading to a rash of illnesses and even death for consumers....

And the cost of the counseling makes a difference not just to people who might participate but also to the doctors or health-care providers who refer them to the programs, according to the study. "Our quantitative and qualitative data underscore that clinicians, not just patients, are influenced by costs," the researchers, from Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, concluded. ...