Why Are Cancer Costs Rising?

Expensive cancer treatments are increasingly blamed for runaway health-care costs in the U.S., but a new study finds a different primary explanation for rising cancer treatment costs: more cancer patients. (As noted in SuperFreakonomics, more people are failing to die from heart disease and therefore live long enough to get cancer.) The study also found that “cancer accounts for only 5 percent of total U.S. medical costs, and that has not changed in the last few decades.” The study, however, doesn’t cover the period since 2005.[%comments]