Luke Timmerman is a journalist who specializes in the life sciences and writes for an on-line magazine called Xconomy out on the West Coast. He is well known for writing bluntly about issues that many members of the media have little real interest in addressing.
In his article in Xconomy today, Timmerman takes on the issue of the cost-effectiveness of new forms of cancer therapy — along with the start-up of a new institute at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle that is dedicated to improving “the efficiency and effectiveness of cancer prevention, early detection and treatment to reduce the economic and human burdens of cancer.”
Timmerman’s article isn’t specific to prostate cancer … but it does address some of the hard truths about what we can (and can’t) afford to spend on cancer treatment in a world with limited financial resources, and whether what we get is really worth the money.
Filed under: Diagnosis, Drugs in development, Living with Prostate Cancer, Management, Risk Tagged: | cost, economics, value
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ongoing trials on the
CTAG PCa web site
Link to Xconomy article is broken.
Sorry about that … Link now fixed.
I apparently just cured prostate cancer for myself by diet, alkaline water, DES, Rife, supplements, baking soda, etc. Who knows … but the 3.0 T MRI scan came back today with all evidence of cancer, lesions, tumors, metastasis, etc., gone. My PSA was up at 98 ng/ml 3 months ago. Our modern cancer treatments are not at all cost effective, and surgeons are too quick with the knife. It does make good press, however; but I don’t believe any of it. We are “fearfully and wonderfully made”, and we can heal ourselves if we try hard enough. Modern medicine is only good for diagnosis and trauma care.
FS
I would have thought that the first step may be the hardest – trying to establish how much is being spent on therapies right now. As I understand it, there is no good information about what the precise cost of an RP is, although there are some guesses.
I’d say this excellent idea is doomed to death by lack of data.
Terry:
Actually, many data are known with great accuracy. For example, we can tell exactly how much money Medicare spends on radical prostatectomies (RPs) in a specific year in a specific region (or even for a specific individual, in fact). And every individual hospital can tell you what they would charge you for an RP.
It is important to distinguish between the existence of data and the ease of public access to those data. That is exactly why the new institute at “the Hutch” will start by focusing on analysis and publication of its own data.
But, but … whenever I have tried to establish relative costs of therapies I am told this is not possible. The reason I have tried to get this information in the past is because many newly diagnosed men want to know — and they can’t find out!
Terry:
You are missing my point, which is that financial administrators can tell each other with precision how much was paid to a specific institution for the care of a specific patient for a specific epoisode of care. However, that cost will depend on who is doing the paying because organizations like Medicare and large insurers are capable of negotiating truly massive discounts by comparison with the costs that will be quoted to individual patients who have no insurance and want to pay cash. In addition, costs in the USA vary by region (for no good reason that I am aware of other than that it costs more to run a hospital in downtown Los Angeles than in rural Idaho).
As I said in my prior comment, the fact that data exist does not imply that getting access to those data is either easy or even possible. And in the USA the cost of a radical prostatectomy varies vastly. I know that there is probably a difference of some $50,000 or more between what Medicare will reimburse a surgeon for carrying out a radical prostatectomy and what that same surgeon may be able to charge an individual, cash-paying patient (if the surgeon’s reputation is high enough).