Colon Cancer Treatment Costs for Medicare
and Dually Eligible Beneficiaries

To estimate the cost attributable to
colon cancer treatment 1 year after diagnosis
by cancer stage, comorbidity, treatment
regimen, and Medicaid eligibility,
we extracted an inception cohort of colon
cancer patients aged 66 and older diagnosed
between 1997 and 2000 from the Michigan
Tumor Registry. Patients were matched to
non-cancer control subjects in the Medicare
Denominator file. We used the difference-indifferences
method to estimate costs attributable
to cancer, controlling for costs prior
to diagnosis. The mean total colon cancer
cost per Medicare patient was $29,196.
The method can be applied to longitudinal
data to estimate long term costs of cancer
from inception where incident patients are
identified from a tumor registry