OBJECTIVES: In 2011, NIH projections suggested the cost of cancer care would rise from $158bn to as much as $207bn by 2020. As a third of all US health expenditures are on hospital care, we investigated the extent to which inpatient costs for the most common cancers have changed in recent years.

METHODS: Using data from the National Inpatient Sample 2012-2016, admissions with a diagnosis of cancer (single-level CCS – category 11-44) were identified. Total hospital cost was reported, stratified by the 10 most frequent cancers for males or females, by all remaining cancers, and by year. Costs were inflation adjusted to 2016 using the medical component of the consumer price index. Discharge-level weights were applied to represent national estimates, and domain analysis was used to account for the use of subpopulations rather than the entire sample.

RESULTS: Mean (95% confidence interval) cost of hospitalization in 2016 ranged from $13,046 ($12,794 - $13,298) for breast cancer to $25,095 ($23,396 - $26,795) for leukemia, with no statistically significant change for any cancer type except pancreas from 2012. There were 6,337,545 hospital admissions of patients with cancer in 2012 and 6,599,259 in 2016. Total expenditures on hospitalization for cancer were $100bn in 2012 and $103bn in 2016 for all cancers, an average annual change of 1% above inflation.

CONCLUSIONS: Neither the overall cost of inpatient cancer treatment nor the cost per admission for the most common individual cancer sites increased more than overall medical inflation rate, (approximately 2.8%/year). Our analysis was limited to the hospital setting and does not include the cost of chemotherapy administered in the outpatient setting.