Addressing Cancer Financial Hardship Begins With Comprehensive Assessment of Patient Economic Burden
Menée à partir des données 2000-2013 des registres américains des cancers, de la base Medicare et d'une enquête de santé, cette étude présente une estimation des coûts restant à la charge des patients atteints d'un cancer et associés aux traitements et soins anticancéreux
The Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER) registry data linked with Medicare enrollment and claims (SEER-Medicare) have created unprecedented opportunities for health services research since their inception (1) and have been the main source to project national costs of cancer care (2-4). As the influx of expensive new treatments threatens the affordability of cancer care—to the extent that “financial toxicity” has become common terminology in oncology—policy makers have been relying on case studies or claims data from commercial insurance to glean information on the economic burden of cancer to patients. The use of SEER-Medicare to understand the full scope of costs to cancer patients and their families has been hindered by the quality of out-of-pocket (OOP) payment information, which remains labeled as one of the “measures that are problematic” on the SEER-Medicare website (5). However, in this issue of the Journal, through clever data analytic strategy that capitalizes on the strengths of SEER-Medicare and the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), Yabroff and colleagues (6) overcome inherent data limitations in SEER-Medicare to produce the most comprehensive national estimate yet of the economic burden of cancer on patients, projected at $21.1 billion for 2019 and including OOP and time costs.(...)
Journal of the National Cancer Institute , éditorial en libre accès, 2020