Proton Therapy - Costs

Costs

Proton therapy is extraordinarily expensive. A proton facility costs $100M to $200M to construct, and costs of treatment range up to $100,000 per patient, twice as much as contemporary radiation therapy, and up to four times as much as surgery, brachytherapy, and other options. In some clinical situations, proton beam therapy is clearly superior than other alternatives, but such cases are relatively rare. Proton beam treatment is therefore aggressively marketed by some institutions--often using claims that are at best marginal, at worse false--to men with prostate cancer, for whom proton therapy has never been shown superior (or even equivalent) to other, less expensive treatments. For this reason, Amitah Chandra, a health economist at Harvard University, has been quoted that "Proton-beam therapy is like the death star of American medical technology... It’s a metaphor for all the problems we have in American medicine.” The advent of second generation, and much less expensive, proton therapy equipment now being installed at various sites may change this picture significantly.