India spent approximately Rs 2,386 crore on oral cancer treatment in 2020, study shows

The rate of new cases being diagnosed has increased by a staggering 68% in the past two decades alone

India spent approximately Rs 2,386 crore in 2020 on oral cancer treatment, according to a study conducted by the Mumbai-based Tata Memorial Centre (TMC).

This is a significant portion of the healthcare budget allocation the government made in 2019-20, towards a single disease.

Without any inflation in costs, this will result in an economic burden on the country of 23,724 crores over the next ten years.

Quoting Global Cancer Observatory (GLOBOCAN) statistics, TMC Director Dr RA Badwe said that the rate of new cases being diagnosed has increased by a staggering 68 per cent in the past two decades alone, making it a real public health crisis. “To add to this, accessibility to health services is low, which coupled with poor health literacy results in a majority of cases presenting with advanced-stage disease that is often difficult to treat,” he said.

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Approximately 10 per cent of the patients have progressive disease that makes them untreatable and can only be offered supportive care for their symptoms.

Most of those who do receive some form of treatment are left unemployed and become an economic burden on their friends and family.

Even patients with health insurance and/or government aid typically seen as immune to the cost of healthcare, face serious challenges as most schemes do not provide the actual amount needed for the treatment.

This eventually increases their out-of-pocket expenses, pushing a significant proportion of the patients themselves and their families into a never-ending cycle of debt.

A TMC team headed by Dr Pankaj Chaturvedi set out to conduct a cost of illness analysis that would provide invaluable information for policymakers that make appropriate allocation of resources towards cancer.

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Dr Arjun Singh, Research Fellow, Tata Memorial Hospital and the lead author of the study said that the unit cost of treating advanced stages (Rs. 2,02,892 ) was found to be 42 per cent greater than early stages (Rs. 1,17,135).

At the same time, there was an average reduction of 11 per cent in the unit costs, as socioeconomic status increased. Medical equipment accounted for 97.8 per cent of capital costs, with the highest contributor being the radiology services that included CT, MRI and PET scan. Variable costs that included consumables for surgery in advanced stages were 1.4 times higher than early stages. With the addition of additional chemo and radiotherapy to surgery, the average cost of treatment increased by 44.6 per cent.

“About 60-80 per cent of the cases of oral cancer visit their specialist oncologists at advanced stages. Multiplying the cost per unit of early and advanced cancer as per the study’s results, India spent approximately Rs. 2,386 crores in 2020 on oral cancer treatment, paid for by insurance schemes, government and private sector spending, out of pocket payments and charitable donations or a combination of these,” he said in the report.

This straining economic impact of oral cancer treatment, strongly suggests that prevention must be one of the key mitigation strategies for addressing affordability.