A clinical supervisor sets up monitoring equipment in a file photo. Five years of cancer care for America’s elderly cost Medicare $21.1 billion, a figure that will swell as the baby boomer generation ages, U.S. government researchers said on Tuesday. (Lee Celano/Reuters)

CHICAGO (Reuters) -
Five years of cancer care for America's
elderly cost Medicare $21.1 billion, a figure that will swell
as the baby boomer generation ages, U.S. government researchers
said on Tuesday.

Researchers at the National Cancer Institute said the cost
of cancer care over five years varies widely by tumor type –
from less than $20,000 for an elderly patient with breast
cancer or melanoma to more than $40,000 for a patient with
lymphoma, brain or other nervous system cancers.

The figures, based on people diagnosed with cancer in 2004,
suggest the highest costs occur within the first 12 months of
care, when people are undergoing costly treatments, and in the
last 12 months of life, when in-hospital costs spike.

The research by Robin Yabroff of the National Cancer
Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, and colleagues, which appears
in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, is intended to
offer policymakers a tool to prepare as the U.S. population
expands and ages.

Joseph Lipscomb, a health policy researcher at Emory
University in Atlanta, said the study is the first to combine
cost estimates and survival data to arrive at long-term
national estimates for 18 of the most common types of cancers
in the elderly.

Medicare is the federal health insurance program for people
65 and older. The researchers based their estimates on
1999-2003 data from more than 700,000 cancer patients covered
by Medicare and more than 1.6 million people covered by
Medicare who did not have cancer.

These per-patient costs were applied to a five-year
survival model and extrapolated to the U.S. Medicare population
diagnosed with cancer in 2004.

Among the 18 cancer types studied, brain and nervous system
cancers were by far the costliest for men in each phase of
treatment over five years. In women, these cancers were the
most expensive in the first year of diagnosis and the last year
of life, but ovarian cancer was the most costly overall.

Cancers with the highest costs overall across women in the
Medicare population were lung ($2 billion), colorectal ($1.6
billion) and breast ($1.4 billion). Among men they were
prostate ($2.3 billion), lung ($2.2 billion) and colorectal
($1.5 billion).

The estimates reflect Medicare discounts and are reported
in 2004 dollars.

“Few of these individual findings are startling; yet, taken
together they provide the scientifically strongest picture yet
of the incidence costs of cancer in aggregate and by tumor type
for the elderly in the United States,” Lipscomb wrote in a
commentary.

The researchers did not include the cost of treating
younger cancer patients, as they tend to receive more costly
and aggressive therapies. As newer, more expensive treatments
become more widely adopted, however, the cancer estimates for
treating Medicare beneficiaries are likely to rise, they said.

There were about 10 million Americans living with cancer in
2003. The National Cancer Institute has estimated that,
overall, the United States spent $72.1 billion in 2004 in
direct costs for cancer care.

(Editing by Maggie Fox and John O'Callaghan)