There But for the Grace of God Go I

Everyone I know has had a family member--sometimes it's my acquaintances themselves--who's had cancer. Whether or not the patient survives, it's a grueling experience for everyone. Years of tests, chemotheraphy, surgery, and/or radiation, plus the financial strain of paying for everything, await.

Fortunately--I realize that's not the appropriate word--most of the cancer victims I'm familiar with were retired or close to retirement, which means that they had Medicare or other health insurance to absorb most of the costs, and they probably didn't need to work to make up money shortfalls.

There is a growing cohort of Americans who are diagnosed long before retirement age, and, even if they survive the cancer, experience financial ruin. [bold added]

The economic burden of a cancer diagnosis is getting strikingly worse in the U.S., as drug and medical costs soar and more patients live longer with the disease. About 55% of cancer drugs introduced between 2019 and 2023 cost at least $200,000 a year, according to Iqvia’s Institute for Human Data Science. And an increasing number of patients are working-age, a group more likely to report financial hardship after diagnosis compared with older adults.

Nearly 60% of working-age cancer survivors report facing some financial difficulty. Many patients struggle to afford care and end up taking on debt, with some getting payday loans or running up credit cards. Cancer alone accounts for some 40% of medical campaigns seeking financial help on GoFundMe, research shows...

Among common diseases, cancer creates a uniquely difficult financial strain known as financial toxicity. Treatments with expensive medicines start immediately and come with a string of nonmedical costs. Chemotherapy and other treatments can leave patients too weak to work for weeks or months. This can result in a twofold blow, with patients losing income and their employer-sponsored health insurance. The financial fallout can last for years...

Many patients have to take time off—or actually stop working—after a cancer diagnosis. Patients who get chemotherapy are more likely to stop working within four years than those who don’t.

Could one straightforward way of relieving the financial burden be to buy up medical debts--for cents on the dollar because they've been sent to collections--then forgive them?

Undue Medical Debt (aka RIP Medical Debt) does exactly that--it's rated four stars by Charity Navigator--and is a 501(c)(3) organization that my church has donated to. RIP Medical Debt opened its books to economic researchers to find out whether paying off medical debt made a difference in people's lives. The results were disappointing:

[Stanford Prof. Neale] Mahoney and his collaborators find no evidence that buying and then forgiving medical debts that are in collections improved on average beneficiaries’ finances, access to credit, or their physical or mental health. People were even less likely to pay existing medical bills after their debt was eliminated.

Prof. Mahoney and other researchers, as well as RIP Medical Debt, are studying if earlier interventions might be more helpful.

Meanwhile, we're just lucky that we were able to enjoy good health during our working years. If either of us had been diagnosed with cancer in our 40's and 50's, when we didn't have much savings and had mortgages and tuitions to pay, then our lives would be immeasurably more difficult.