The Cost of Cancer Care

As Ezra pointed out recently, the cost of your health care depends a lot on where you live. An MRI that costs $1,080 here in the United States would come in at $280 in France. Even within the United States, there’s big variation in how much we pay for the exact same treatment.

Not all health care cost variation, however, has to do with geography: It turns out that what kind of facility you seek treatment at matters a lot, too. An episode of cancer treatment costs 24 percent more at a hospital than if the same course of treatment were carried out at a doctor’s office, according to a new analysis from Avalere Health.

The Avalere study aimed to compare the net costs, everything paid by both the patient and the insurance company, of patients’ course of treatment. It compares cancer care that’s managed by a doctor’s office (about 75 percent of current treatments) versus those overseen by a hospital. They controlled for patients’ age, gender, length of cancer treatment and prior cancer history.

Read the full story: http://hcp.lv/HgqNSs

Source: The Washington Post