The Increasing Cost of Treating Cancer

The World Health Organization estimates cancer treatments cost more than One-Trillion dollars world wide. Our Project Money looks at the cost of treating an surge in cancer across the globe and asks if choices on treatment are about to become more stark and more tied to budgets.

"The big difference with this report compared to the previous one six years ago is first of all that we're seeing a very rapid increase in the numbers of cancers worldwide, but particularly in the lower and middle income countries. The current incidence of new cases of cancer each year worldwide is about 14 million. But just in the next 12 or 13 years, this will be over 20 million new cases per year worldwide. So this tells us that cancer is a truly a global problem and that we're not going to be able to address this problem simply by improving the treatment of the disease."Chris Wild with the WHO on the new report on cancer.

This week, Chris Wild, the director of the World Health Organization's agency that researchers cancer offered projections for cancer rates around the world and the news is startling. After consulting with 250 scientists from 40 countries, he found incidents of cancer are growing at an alarming pace.

Chris Wild says new strategies are desperately needed in the face of what he called a disaster that is expected to sweep the globe over the next 20 years. The report says half of all cancers are preventable ... that 60 per cent of the world's new cancer cases are in the developing world. And it flags that developed countries should be worried about the increasing cost of treatment.

Today, as part of our Project Money -- we're looking into the difficult choices ahead as both cancer rates and the amount of treatment rise. The WHO estimates the total economic cost of cancer in 2010 was about 1.16-trillion-dollars.

The Canadian Medical Association Journal has published a calculation of cancer treatment costs in this country. Using Ontario data, it looked at the cost of treatment in the first-year of diagnosis for the seven most common types of cancer -- And it compared those costs in 2007 those a decade earlier in 1997.

Average cost for cancer treatments in the first year after diagnosis

For patients aged 19 to 44

• Melanoma: $9,000 ... three times more than what it cost ten years earlier.
  

• Breast cancer: $9,000 ... twice as much as what it cost ten years earlier.

For patients aged 19 to 44

• Breast cancer: $25,000

• Prostate cancer: $22,000

• Lung cancer: $15,000

• Colorectal cancer: $25,000

In all of those cases, the cost for treatment in the first year after diagnosis are roughly double what they were ten years earlier.

Steven Lewis is a health policy consultant in Saskatoon and adjunct professor of health policy at Simon Fraser University.

As the rates of cancer rise, health care resources may be stretched thin. Ethical implications of this shift --- and whether physicians and policy makers will have to rethink who and how they treat patients is something Kerry Bowman feels need to be addressed.

Kerry Bowman is a Bio-Ethicist at the University of Toronto.

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This segment was produced by The Current's Dawna Dingwall, Gord Westmacott and Naheed Mustafa.