Cancer patients are skipping vital treatments due to rising living costs. Cancer Council Victoria reports a 50% surge in financial counselling referrals as families juggle medical bills, mortgages, and daily expenses.
For more, Cancer Council Victoria's head of strategy and support Danielle Spence, joins.
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Well, cancer patients and survivors are facing a grim reality this morning with new data showing, therefore going vital medication and scans due to the cost of living. A report by Cancer Council Victoria reveals a more than 50 per cent surge in referrals to financial counselling with some families struggling to balance medical bills, mortgages and just everyday expenses. Cancer Council Victoria's head of strategy and support Daniel Spence joins us live from Melbourne. Daniel, good morning to you. These are tough decisions, potentially devastating consequences, just paint a picture of what this data is showing and what it looks like for patients and survivors right now. We know that people report to us just how expensive it is to be diagnosed with cancer. So out of pocket costs can range from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands of dollars. We know there was a landmark study back in 2021 by Consumer Health Forum that showed on average people were out of pocket five thousand dollars with actually one in four being out of pocket ten thousand dollars and in a country with universal health care that's really concerning to us. So is it the problem that a lot of those costs are up front so you're out of pocket for a while you can't recoup the money quickly enough from either Medicare or private health funds? There's always up front costs if you go particularly private but it's really the cumulative effects of a cancer diagnosis so you might be in the treatment system for twelve months but you're also in the follow-up system for many years and that might be through your GP and we know in Australia only around one in four GP's will actually offer bulk billing services. So it's all those incidental costs that are surrounded diagnosis as well just things like hospital parking. It's about fifty dollars to park in our major hospitals which is crazy should be free anyway which is a crazy set of circumstances. This is a lot of anguish and pressure on people at their most vulnerable time. Are you expecting that to get worse in the year ahead? Absolutely. It was over a fifty percent increase last year. We think that will continue. We know that the cost of living crisis is pinching people in many ways but particularly when we have serious illness. We see people having to dip into savings. If they have them we see people trying to access welfare and people taking out things like credit cards just to pay cancer bills so that's really concerning for us. Alright Danny, it's an election year ahead maybe there will be solutions there in budgets that may be on the way. Let's hope so. Thank you for joining us this morning. Thank you Michael. (whooshing) [BLANK_AUDIO]
