Xconomy: Why Are Healthcare Costs Exploding? See Proton Cancer Therapy
Summary
Here in the Northwest, there are about 40,000 cancer patients who get treated in the five-state Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana and Idaho (WWAMI) territory that UW Medicine serves, Laramore says.Todd Barnett, a radiation oncologist at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, says he’s personally interested in the potential of proton therapy, and even had a series of business meetings with the ProCure folks when they were considering their Northwest expansion plans five years ago.And unlike proton therapy, these systems have real-time imaging capability that can tell when the tumor has shifted outside the radiation beam, potentially causing harm to healthy tissues.If somebody came out with a $9,000 toaster, you’d say, ‘Why would I do that, my toast is fine?’” I asked another oncologist at Swedish Medical Center, Jack West, what he’d recommend to his dad if he had prostate cancer.A few businesspeople in our healthcare system have decided to spend massive amounts of money on equipment and marketing, to advance a new treatment paradigm with a mixed bag of medical evidence behind it.
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