Study shows cost of cancer treatment expected to exceed $37-billioin in 2034
Of all the struggles Vanessa Percoco faced during her fight against cancer, the ones she least expected were financial.
Ms. Percoco, who was just 31 when she was diagnosed with colorectal cancer in 2022, was surprised at the essentials that weren’t covered by the public health system in her home province of Quebec. She had to pay for take-home medications to ease the side effects of chemotherapy, supplies to keep her colostomy bag in place and physiotherapy and nutrition counselling to help restore her health.
Ms. Percoco estimates that, with the help of family and friends, she spent $15,000 over two years for expenses related to her cancer care. She sometimes asked herself which should come first: medication or rent.
“That’s not a normal stress,” she said. “It’s not fair to have to think like that.”
Ms. Percoco’s experience is far from unique, according to a new study from the Canadian Cancer Society. The report, to be released Monday, predicts the disease will cost Canadian society $37.7-billion in 2024. Eighty per cent of those costs will be borne by public health systems and the taxpayers who fund them, but 20 per cent – or $7.5-billion – will come from the bank accounts of cancer patients and their caregivers.
People with cancer spend, on average, $33,000 over their lifetime on expenses related to their care, said Jennifer Gillis, senior manager of surveillance for the Canadian Cancer Society and a co-chair of the Canadian Cancer Statistics Advisory Committee.
“The impact of that $33,000 is not equally felt,” she added. “For people on low incomes or fixed incomes, that can represent years of saving for a down payment, their education, their kids’ educations – so many things that are really meaningful to them.”
The new study, which was produced in partnership with Statistics Canada and the Public Health Agency of Canada, lays out the financial cost of cancer not only to individuals, but also to a medical system that will require more public money over the next decade to fight the disease.
The direct cost of cancer to provincial and territorial health ministries is expected to rise to $37.4-billion a year in 2034, a 24-per-cent increase from $30.2-billion this year.
Lung cancer, the most frequently diagnosed and deadliest type of the disease in Canada, is expected to have “the steepest increase and highest overall societal cost in 2034,” according to the report – despite encouraging recent declines in lung-cancer rates and mortality.
The overall cost of treating cancer is expected to keep rising in part because Canada’s population is growing and aging. Getting old is a major risk factor for cancer. In 2000, about 138,000 people in Canada were diagnosed with cancer. This year, that figure is expected to be around 247,000.
As well, improvements in cancer detection and treatment are helping patients live longer, which means more years of expensive care than was the case decades ago, when cancer often killed patients quickly. As of 2018, there were more than 1.5 million Canadians living with or beyond cancer, the report said.
“This is a great news story, that more people are doing well and are surviving through their cancers,” said Darren Brenner, a cancer epidemiologist at the University of Calgary and co-chair of the Canadian Cancer Statistics Advisory Committee. “So all of these factors combined – growth in the population, longer survival with more complex and costly care – is really driving the increases in cost.”
The study projects that treating the three most common types of cancer – lung, breast and colorectal – will cost the health system nearly $13-billion this year. The most expensive cancer to treat on a per-patient basis is multiple myeloma, a blood cancer for which it costs just more than $500,000 to treat a single patient over their lifetime, mostly because of high-priced drugs and treatments, including stem-cell transplants.
The second most expensive is leukemia, with an average treatment cost of nearly $267,000 a person.
When looking at the financial toll of cancer on individuals, the study said 49 per cent of those costs come in the form of out-of-pocket spending on essentials such as medical supplies and prescription drugs. Time costs, including hours spent in hospital waiting rooms or travelling to specialized cancer clinics, accounted for 34 per cent of individual costs. Indirect costs, such as lost income, made up the rest.
Ms. Percoco, who lives in the Montreal suburb of Saint-Eustache, bore all those types of costs as she fought through three grueling surgeries, chemotherapy and nearly two years of living with a colostomy bag.
After working as a special-needs educator, she had gone back to school to become a special needs classroom teacher. She was three weeks into a teaching contract in the spring of 2022 when she became too sick to work because of what she soon learned was colon cancer. She was left without an income or private health benefits.
“I survived,” Ms. Percoco, now 33, said. But she thinks often of cancer patients who weren’t as fortunate, and who had to spend their final months “looking for money, bothering people, depending on people. I don’t think that’s fair.”
This article was first reported by The Globe and Mail
