United States: A model study reveals that cancer screening costs over USD 40 billion every year in the United States. This estimate is derived from the updated reports for all costs related to screening for five leading types of cancer in 2021.
The researchers believe this data is crucial in guiding policy and suitability, including enhancing equitable access to recommended cancer screenings.
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The findings are available in the Annals of Internal Medicine journal.
Investigators from the National Institutes of Health employed data from a national healthcare survey and cost resources to determine the total first-year cost of cancer screening in the USA in 2021, excluding follow-up expenses, as news-medical.net reported.
To assign the costs, the researchers multiplied the total number of people screened for breast, cervical, colorectal, lung, and prostate cancers and their related healthcare system costs by the average insurance cost per screen in 2021 dollars.
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From this, they noted that cancer screening costs USD 43 billion every year, and for colorectal cancer alone, it constituted about 64 percent of the total amount.
About 88.3 percent of the costs were incurred, and 8.5 percent were devoted to Medicaid and other programs. They identified that the main cost paid to screening facilities was a chief contributor to the expense.
The authors stress that though this is a significant total, as has been endorsed by others, recommended cancers have been shown to decrease cancer-specific survival, and screening for breast, cervical, colorectal, and lung cancer has been described as either cost-effective or cost-saving in the USA, as news-medical.net reported.
Moreover, recommended cancer screening has the premise of early detection of cancer at cheaper stages, hence reducing costs incurred due to disease and poverty as a result of treatment, leading to an improved quality of life.
An accompanying editorial says that estimating the cost associated with cancer screening is a useful start but may be an understatement because it does not consider three essential screening components that affect costs: followed by a screening of ineligible patients and overdiagnosis or over-treatment.