FAIR Health Consumer Access

Cancer in Younger Adults

Cancer is more common in people 50 and older. But concern has been growing in recent years over cancer in adults younger than 50. In a new white paper, FAIR Health studied cancer trends in adults aged 18 to 49 from 2016 to 2023. These are some of the findings.

Cancer Treatment Rates
From 2016 to 2023, overall cancer treatment rates fell in patients aged 18 to 49. The cancer treatment rate is the share of patients with cancer who received medical services in a given year out of all patients in a given age group who received medical services in that same year.

Cancer treatment rates didn’t fall for all cancers and age groups. For example, for patients aged 40 to 49, the cancer treatment rate rose 11.2 percent for cancers of the digestive system. It rose even higher—18.2 percent—for colorectal cancer.

More recently—from 2020 to 2023—cancer treatment rates rose in patients aged 18 to 49. The greatest rise was 11.7 percent in patients aged 18 to 29. That was followed by 7.5 percent in patients aged 40 to 49 and 7.2 percent in patients aged 30 to 39.

Types of Cancer
The most common type of cancer in adults aged 18 to 49 in 2023 was skin cancer. The second most common was breast cancer. The third most common cancers were cancers of the thyroid and other endocrine glands. The fourth most common were cancers of digestive organs. The fifth most common were cancers of female genital organs.

Costs
FAIR Health looked at costs for patients aged 18 to 49 diagnosed with cancer in 2022. For these patients, the median allowed amount for all medical services received during the first 12 months after their diagnosis was more than $8,400. An allowed amount is the total fee agreed upon between a health plan and a provider for an in-network service. It includes both the part the patient pays and the part the plan pays. The median is the middle value in a set of numbers. Half of the values are less than the median and half are greater.

That cost was almost eight times higher than the median allowed amount for patients of like age without cancer who received at least one medical service from July 1, 2022, to June 30, 2023. Those patients had a median allowed amount for all medical services received of about $1,100.

The median is not the same as the average. The average is the value found by dividing the sum of all the values by the number of values. There was an especially big difference in median versus average allowed amounts for two types of cancers in patients aged 18 to 49. One type was leukemias (cancers of the blood). The other type was lymphomas (cancers of the lymph system).

The median allowed amount for all leukemias was less than $9,000. But the average allowed amount was over $135,000. The median allowed amount for all lymphomas was almost $12,000. But the average allowed amount was over $95,000.

These differences showed that some patients had much higher costs than the median amount. One factor that led to higher cancer treatment costs was the use of chemotherapy or immunotherapy. Another factor was a hospital stay.

Cancer Screening
In the age group 40-49, 25.8 percent of patients in 2016 received any kind of cancer screening. This rose to 35.4 percent in 2023, a 36.9 percent increase. This was the largest rise in the share receiving any kind of cancer screening among patients aged 18 to 49.

Breast cancer screening in the 40-49 age group rose from 36.1 percent of patients in 2016 to 41.1 percent in 2023, a 13.9 percent increase. Colon cancer screening rose from 4.0 percent in 2016 to 12.4 percent in 2023, an increase of 206.8 percent.