While drug prices are rising, and more treatment is done is hospitals, Community Oncology Alliance finds growth rate similar to other treatments.

Despite recent attention to rising pharmaceutical prices, a new study claims the total costs of treating patients with cancer in the United States have risen no faster than overall costs for Medicare and commercial insurance in the past decade.

Conducted by actuarial firm Milliman, the findings contradict conventional wisdom that cancer care costs have rapidly outpaced other healthcare spending trends. In fact, the results found that total costs of treating patients with cancer have increased at essentially the same rate as all healthcare spending since 2004.

Commissioned by the Community Oncology Alliance, the study looked at claims data for Medicare and commercially insured patient populations from 2004 to 2014. Aside from discovering that the increases in costs during that period were essentially the same in actively treated cancer patients and the non-cancer population, it also found that drug spending — which made up one-fifth of the total costs in actively treated cancer patients in 2014 — has increased at the highest rate of all component costs, fueled by new biologic cancer drugs.

Cancer care has also moved into the more expensive hospital setting since 2004, an important driver of the increase in the care costs.

Per-patient costs for the total population, actively treated cancer population, and non-cancer population increased at very similar rates over the 11-year study period. Among Medicare recipients, the increases were 35.2 percent per patient per year for the total population, 36.4 percent for the actively treated cancer population, and 34.8 percent for the non-cancer population.

For the commercially insured, the cost increases were 62.9 percent for the total population, 62.5 percent for the actively-treated cancer population, and 60.8 percent for the non-cancer population.

For this study, Milliman researchers defined “actively treated” cancer patients as those with one or more claims for chemotherapy, radiation therapy or cancer surgery in a given year. “Non-actively treated” cancer patients included all members coded with a cancer diagnosis but not having one or more claims for those treatments within the year. All members without a cancer diagnosis code were considered the non-cancer population, while the total population contains all three of these groups.

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