Estimated annual prevalence, medical service utilization and direct costs of lung cancer in urban China

Abstract

Background Evidence‐based policy making for delivering affordable lung cancer care relies on the breadth, depth and quality of knowledge of its treatment costs. This study estimates the annual prevalence, medical service utilization and direct treatment costs of lung cancer in urban China. Materials and Methods Using claim data from China's urban basic medical insurance between 2013 and 2016, we constructed a nationally representative sample of lung cancer patients in urban China. Weighted descriptive analyses, Poisson regressions and generalized linear modelling were used to analyse lung cancer medical service utilization and costs and their associations with patient characteristics. Results In urban China, the annual prevalence of lung cancer was 87.65/100000, with nearly 0.65% of total health expenditures of urban residents spent on lung cancer treatments. Weighted average annual total medical costs of lung cancer was RMB33.78 (US$5.36) thousand, with annual out‐of‐pocket costs of RMB10.26 (US$1.63) thousand. The average yearly number of lung cancer‐related outpatient visits was 2.42 and inpatient admissions was 2.07, with an average cost of RMB0.75 (US$0.12) thousand for outpatients and RMB 15.67 (US$2.49) thousand for inpatients. Inpatient expenses were the major component (95%) of lung cancer medical costs, with roughly 67% of inpatient services occurring in high‐level tertiary hospitals. Medical care utilization and direct medical costs were associated with sex, age and insurance status. Western medicine costs were the major contributor (39.4%) to average lung cancer‐related medical costs. Conclusion Lung cancer imposed a significant economic burden on China's health system and a financial cost on lung cancer sufferers and their families. Specific policies are required to efficiently allocate health resources, contain health expenditure and decrease the individual financial burden of lung cancer.

Medical expenditure for lung cancer in China: a multicenter, hospital-based retrospective survey

“…A previous multi-center study on lung cancer direct medical expenditure published in 2021 measured the direct medical expenditure of enrollees using claim data of urban basic medical insurance between 2013 and 2016[ 16 ]. The consequent estimate of inpatient expenditure was 34,240 CNY (US$5,414) per lung cancer patient which was slightly lower than our survey.…”

Optimal time‐consistent social health insurance and private health insurance strategy under a new health insurance framework

“…The expressions in ( 27) and ( 28) for the expectation of X u T and the objective function, respectively, imply that the expectation and the objective function for the considered MV problem (7) are separable with respect to x, as given in (24) and (25). ▪ Theorem 2.…”

“…Saito et al 23 used the Poisson regression model to predict the incidence of catastrophic health expenditure among households affected by a particular illness. Zhu et al 24 applied the Poisson regression model to predict lung cancer medical service expenditure.…”

“…For example, Poisson process is used to describe the number of insurance claims (Bai et al, 25 Delsing and Mandjes, 26 Yang et al 27 ), the number of stock price jumps (Chen and Yang, 28 Li et al, 29 Yang et al, 30 Zeng et al 31 ), the number of premium income (Ragulina, 32 Temnov, 33 Wang et al 34 ) and the number of dividend payments (Avanzi et al, 35 Dong and Zhou 36 ) in insurance and finance. Considering these practical applications and inspired by the above empirical studies of Ahmad and Aggarwal, 20 Ma et al, 21 Nguyen et al, 22 Saito et al 23 and Zhu et al, 24 we assume that the number of general illnesses and critical illnesses, respectively, follow a Poisson process. From the real data analyses of China Health and Nutrition Survey (CHNS) from 1989 to 2015, China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) from 2011 to 2017and China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) from 2011 to 2018, we find that there is no significant dependency among individual (family) illness expenditures at different times.…”

Spending and Hospital Stay for Melanoma in Hunan, China

“…Hence, the health insurance system plays a significant role in improving health equity and patients' prognoses by facilitating timely treatments. In recent years, many studies explored the impact of the Chinese health insurance system on LOS and the cost of colorectal cancer (11), lung cancer (12), and gastric cancer ( 13), but few investigated melanoma. The current study aimed to describe the financial burden of melanoma and investigate the factors for LOS and costs for patients under surgery in Hunan.…”