Radiation, chemo costs drive cancer spending in U.S.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The cost of treating cancer has soared in the United States as more chemotherapy and radiation treatments become available to more patients, researchers reported on Tuesday.

While the availability of therapy is good news for patients, the added costs will strain public health insurance plans such as Medicare, the researchers reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

For instance, the cost of treating a lung cancer patient for a year rose by $7,139 between 1991 and 2002, to $39,891, after adjusting for inflation, Joan Warren of the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland and colleagues found.

They analyzed data from the Surveillance, Epidemiology and End-Results database, looking at 306,709 people aged 65 or older diagnosed with breast, lung, colorectal or prostate cancer between 1991 and 2002.

They compared the cost of initial cancer treatment, separating cancer-related surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy and other hospitalization.

The cost for treating a patient with colorectal cancer for one year climbed by $5,345 to an average of $41,134 between 1991 and 2002. For breast cancer the average cost rose by $4,189 to $20,964.

The cost of treating a man for prostate cancer fell slightly, by $196, during the same period to an average of $18,261 in 2002, because fewer men got surgery.

Overall, it cost $6.7 billion to treat patients with these four most common U.S. cancers in 2002, Warren's team found.

"These data do not reflect the current (2008) or future costs to the Medicare program related to cancer care. Expensive chemotherapies will place a strain on the financial resources of the Medicare program," they wrote.

Medicare is the federal health insurance program for people ages 65 and older and the disabled.

Last April, a team at the NCI estimated that five years of cancer care for all cancers among America's elderly cost Medicare $21.1 billion.

Cancer is the second-leading cause of death in the United States, after heart disease. About 10 million Americans are living with cancer.

(Reporting by Maggie Fox, editing by Will Dunham and David Wiessler)