Cancer care cost trends in the United States: 1998 to 2012.

Background: The authors examine trends in spending on cancer from 1998 through 2012, including cancer care costs, prevalence, and cases by payer, and discuss the results within the context of a prior analysis and recent health policy and programmatic changes.

Methods: Condition-specific distribution of expenditures from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, supplemented with results from the National Nursing Home Survey and other data sources, was used as the basis for allocating the Personal Health Care components of the National Health Expenditure Accounts among conditions.

Results: Cancer care expenditures grew at an annualized rate of 2.

The growth in cost per case explains far more of US health spending increases than rising disease prevalence.

Some prior research has suggested that health spending for many diseases has been driven more by increases in so-called treated prevalence-the number of people receiving treatment for a given condition-than by increases in cost per case. Our study reached a different conclusion. We examined treated prevalence, clinical prevalence-the number of people with a given disease, treated or not-and cost per case across all medical conditions between 1996 and 2006.