Why is bladder cancer more expensive to treat than other cancers?
Bladder cancer is thought to be either the second or the third most expensive cancer to treat, through the healthcare system. The reason is that patients live years and decades, and do not succumb to the disease, but have frequent recurrences, frequent relapses, and need very close and careful follow-up examination. Most of these examinations, the cystoscopic examinations, are either done in the office or in a clinic. When they require a transurethral resection, if a tumor is found and you have to come to the hospital to have it resected or removed, it requires a hospital procedure, although it's outpatient. Hospital costs tend to be staggering, so when you figure that it's not unusual for a patient to live ten or fifteen years with bladder cancer, that currently the recommendation is that at the time of diagnosis, they be cystoscoped every three months for two years, every four months for the next year or two, and then every six months for an additional couple of years, and once a year at least for the rest of their life. All of those costs tend to add up. When you add in the cost of intravesicle therapy with either chemotherapeutic agents or biologic agents like BCG, those are administered on a weekly basis for six weeks at a time, and then the maintenance is every three weeks, or every three months. Again, if you multiply that by the number of years that these patients are alive, cared for and treated, the costs are staggering.
