Cost Trend Analysis of Initial Cancer Treatment in Taiwan

Tsai-Yun Li, Jan-Sing Hsieh, King-Teh Lee, Ming-Feng Hou, Chia-Ling Wu, Hao-Yun Kao and Hon-Yi Shi

PLOS ONE, 2014, vol. 9, issue 10, 1-11

Abstract: Background: Despite the high cost of initial cancer care, that is, care in the first year after diagnosis, limited information is available for specific categories of cancer-related costs, especially costs for specific services. This study purposed to identify causes of change in cancer treatment costs over time and to perform trend analyses of the percentage of cancer patients who had received a specific treatment type and the mean cost of care for patients who had received that treatment. Methodology/Principal Findings: The analysis of trends in initial treatment costs focused on cancer-related surgery, chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and treatments other than active treatments. For each cancer-specific trend, slopes were calculated for regression models with 95% confidence intervals. Analyses of patients diagnosed in 2007 showed that the National Health Insurance (NHI) system paid, on average, $10,780 for initial care of a gastric cancer patient and $10,681 for initial care of a lung cancer patient, which were inflation-adjusted increases of $6,234 and $5,522, respectively, over the 1996 care costs. During the same interval, the mean NHI payment for initial care for the five specific cancers increased significantly (p

Date: 2014
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0108432 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 08432&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0108432

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0108432

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().