The cost of oncology care has increased significantly in recent years, leading employers to worry about how they can provide consistent benefits for employees with cancer and their family members, according to Karen van Caulil, PhD, president and CEO of the Florida Health Care Coalition.
The cost of oncology care has increased significantly in recent years, leading employers to worry about how they can provide consistent benefits for employees with cancer and their family members, according to Karen van Caulil, PhD, president and CEO of the Florida Health Care Coalition.
Transcript (slightly modified)
What do employers view as the biggest challenge with oncology care?
Well, the cost and quality go hand in hand, but I would have to say that the top concern is the cost. We’ve been looking at the cost of care for cancer patients and we took some data recently from 2010, 2011, and 2012 and averaged it; and 2013, 2014, and 2015 and averaged it, and saw an overall increase of 70% in the cost of medical and pharmaceutical expenses for cancer patients.
It was about 62% increase for breast cancer patients, I think 65% for prostate cancer patients, so that has to top the list in terms of concerns because it’s really, with the trajectory of the cost increase, a lot of employers are really concerned about being able to provide the rich benefits that they have for so long for their employees and their family members.
Managed Care Reflections: A Q&A With A. Mark Fendrick, MD, and Michael E. Chernew, PhD
December 2nd 2025To mark the 30th anniversary of The American Journal of Managed Care (AJMC), each issue in 2025 includes a special feature: reflections from a thought leader on what has changed—and what has not—over the past 3 decades and what’s next for managed care. The December issue features a conversation with AJMC Co–Editors in Chief A. Mark Fendrick, MD, director of the Center for Value-Based Insurance Design and a professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; and Michael E. Chernew, PhD, the Leonard D. Schaeffer Professor of Health Care Policy and the director of the Healthcare Markets and Regulation Lab at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.
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