Noam Levey reports for Kaiser Health News on the particularly severe medical debt people with cancer often bear. Levey profiles a breast cancer patient who faces $30,000 of debt, along with constant threats from collection agencies. She, like many people with cancer, must make tradeoffs that no one should have to make to pay off the debt.
Cancer kills hundreds of thousands of Americans each year. People with and without insurance, young and old. New treatments are saving more lives but at an extremely high price. More than six in ten people with cancer have had to reduce their spending on necessities like food and clothing because of the high cost of their treatment. One in four of them have been pushed into bankruptcy, been evicted from their homes or had their homes foreclosed on them.
According to the National Cancer Institute, treating someone with cancer can cost more than $1 million in the first year. On average, it costs $42,000 in the first year. People with Medicare are not spared high out-of-pocket costs. Those with blood cancer typically pay $17,000 of their own money for treatment in year one.
About 100 million Americans have medical debt. Having cancer has been found to increase your likelihood of medical debt by 71 percent. It also makes it more than twice as likely that you will declare bankruptcy than people without cancer. And, the data show that those with cancer in bankruptcy were more likely to die than those not in bankruptcy.
People with cancer are more likely than other people with medical debt to owe a lot of money and are also more likely to believe they will never be able to afford to pay off the debt. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that about 20 percent of people with cancer who face medical debt owe more than $10,000.
High out-of-pocket costs leave patients making unconscionable choices. Many end up forgoing life-saving treatment so as not to incur more costs. Research shows that 18 percent of people on chemotherapy stop treatment. Of those, nearly half stop treatment when their costs rise above $2,000.
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