Tallying up breast cancer treatment costs

Longtermsurvivor

Tallying up breast cancer treatment costs The cost of treatment for breast cancer can vary widely from one regimen to the next — and from one patient to the next. Researchers broke down the data on nearly 15,000 women who were diagnosed with breast cancer between 2008 and 2012 and started chemo within three months of their diagnosis. The median insurance payment for patients who received chemo along with trastuzumab — a monoclonal antibody that's used in some combination therapies — totaled $160,590. For patients who were on a similarly effective standard chemotherapy treatment, the median insurance payment was just $82,260. There were also disparities from one treatment to another when it came to the amount patients had to pay out-of-pocket. The research will be published in the journal Cancer.