Cancer patients in the U.S. paid nearly $4 billion in out-of-pocket costs in 2014 and the disease cost the country $87.8 billion in cancer-related health care spending, a report by the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network found.
How’s this for a paradox: The better cancer centers become at keeping patients alive, the more expensive cancer care becomes. This brutal tradeoff hits harder in rural areas, where the cancer burden is higher and the investigator and clinical trial representation is lower.
