Every person covered by Medicare would shell out an additional $3 a month if the government agreed to pay to screen certain current and former smokers for lung cancer, a new study estimates.
It would cost Medicare $2 billion a year to follow recent advice to offer these lung scans, the study found.
Joshua Roth of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle said the researchers were merely tallying the cost and were not “judging value” or saying whether Medicare should pay it. He led the study, which was released Wednesday.
Lung cancer is the world’s top cancer killer, mainly because it’s usually found too late for treatment to do much good. Most deaths involve Medicare-age people, and most are due to smoking.
Recently, a major study found that annual CT scans could cut the chances of dying from lung cancer by up to…
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