The Financial Impact of a Cancer Diagnosis Can Be Devastating

January 3, 2012

From the article in CureToday

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Medical Debt: An Unspoken Side Effect of Cancer Care

BY KATY HUMAN
PUBLISHED DECEMBER 21, 2011

"Medical bankruptcies have been on the rise in the past decade. In 2001, more than 46 percent of bankruptcies were medical; the figure jumped to 69 percent by 2007. 

“We know that insurers are shifting more of the cost of cancer care to patients, so that even our insured patients are experiencing more out-of-pocket expenses,” says Yousuf Zafar, MD, an oncologist at the Duke Cancer Institute in Durham, N.C. 

“In addition, cancer care is expensive, and cancer care is frequent, and it is multimodal,” Zafar says. “When I’m treating cancer patients, I sometimes see them weekly; I have to prescribe multiple medications, multiple interventions. The results add up rapidly.”

Read the full article at: http://curetoday.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/article.show/id/2/article_id/1792

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