Cancer cost "becoming unsustainable" in rich nations

Reuters ^ | September 26, 2011 | By Kate Kelland

[Oldeconomybuyer]

An explosion of new technologies and treatments for cancer coupled with a rapid rise in cases of the disease worldwide mean cancer care is rapidly becoming unaffordable in many developed countries, oncology experts said on Monday.

With costs ballooning, a radical shift in thinking is needed to ensure fairer access to medicines and address tricky questions like balancing extra months of life for patients against costs of a new drug, technology or care plan, they said.

"The cancer community needs to take responsibility and not accept a sub-standard evidence base and an ethos of very small benefit at whatever cost," said a report commissioned by the Lancet Oncology medical journal on the costs of cancer care.

"There should be fair prices and real value from new technologies."

Some 12 million people worldwide are diagnosed with cancer each year and that number is expected to rise to 27 million by 2030.

[Marty62]

He just regurgitates the Fascist, National Socialist view of the world. He’s a DumoRat afterall.

[petro45acp]

If the medical industrial complex (cancer division) is about to price itself out of the market, why not just cure the disease and get it over with. That would free up accountants for the diabetes division, the viral diseases division (common cold, watch out), and the life extension division.

[Thommas]

I wonder if treatment for AIDS will ever become “unsustainable”...

What's the cost of the HIV treatment cocktail, these days? $20 - $30K a month? Merely a drop in the Obamacare bucket when saving those sacred homosexual voters.

But, to save the life of your spouse, child or parent when they are likely a conservative voter, "unsustainable" is exactly the word Debbie Wasserman-Shultz would like to use.

[dragnet2]

Trying to kill us off faster, so they have more SS to keep and less Medicare to expend.

I keep hearing people say that. The number of people being struck with cancer is really unbelievable...The chemo treatment places now resemble treatment mills, with rooms filled with people... Did they dust us with some bad juju?

Many of these people today have no insurance, and the insurance companies and medical industry and their armies of attorneys have no problem seizing their homes, asset's, everything, just to make them pay to live....

Meanwhile, government employees retire at 50, with the best top shelf medical benefits/insurance, and lottery style tax paid retirement pensions.

[Reeses]

why not just cure the disease and get it over with.

If nobody died on cue the United States would quickly go bankrupt and the world would enter a Dark Age. If we didn't have cancer we'd have to invent it. Such is the price of socialism.

[dragnet2]

“The cancer community ...” Words fail me.

It seems reality fails you too.

You must be one of the lucky one's not to see the mills, where large open rooms are filled with people receiving chemo, where one gets up, and another sits down for their treatment....24/7 365 days a year.

[Tax-chick]

I know people have cancer. I know people WHO have cancer, or who had cancer until they died of cancer. It is the concept of a “cancer community,” as some sort of socio-political bloc, that left me speechless. Typing-less.

[dragnet2]

Why not, we have the homo community, the African American community, the Hispanic community, the illegal alien community, the Jewish community, the cannibal community etc, etc...

[Outlaw Woman]

Precisely

[PapaBear3625]

Notice the fascistic nature of the chart. The probability of intervention starts very low for young children (who have no immediate value to the State), and peaks at the age of 20 or so (the age where the State has invested a lot in the young person in the form of education). The graph has a heavy downturn at 55, the age where a person's medical costs may start exceeding the tax revenue they generate, and collapses at the point where the person is likely retired and generating negative tax revenue.

It's all about how valuable the person is to the State.

[PapaBear3625]

HIV treatment costs are between $2,100 and $4,700 per month, depending on whether the infection is caught before or after it collapses his immune system. Total lifetime costs estimate: $618,900 in 2004 dollars -- because you never come off treatment, you get treated til you die.

[Tax-chick]

Why not, we have the (blah blah blah) community ...?

All of those "communities" are fictitious, leading one to presume that a "cancer community" is the same. If there were such a thing, wouldn't its members be working together to attempt to maximize research, prevention, and treatment, independent of reliance on forces outside the community? Wouldn't rich members of the "cancer community" be privately funding treatment for poorer members of their "community"?

It seems to me that part of the definition of a community would be that it supports those inside against the competing goals of those who would just as soon see all cancer patients pushing up daisies before "they" use any more of "my" resources.

[greatplains]

"I wonder if treatment for AIDS will ever become “unsustainable”...

Oh, no, that just wouldn't be fair, we can't discriminate against a particular segment of our population. Oh, wait...

[the invisib1e hand]

It's all about how valuable the person is to the State.

That's correct. It's a diabolical attack on human dignity. The reduction of man to chattel. Unquestionably. And if it ever gets steam, it will be every bit as evil as the Third Reich (perhaps more so, because it has motivating it a utilitarian logic which is even more of an affront to the goodness of sound reason than was Hitler's insanity -- it's reason against reason). Which is why it must be stopped.