How do you treat cancer in the US? Asking out of curiosity but I want serious answers. (lemmy.today)

submitted 10 hours ago by vivalapivo@lemmy.today to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

31 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I am not from the US. Had my close relative fight with cancer. If not for the government which sponsored it almost fully, excluding a couple of procedures like PET, it would cost our family a lot. Just for the scale: pial for one infusion of one out of three drugs would cost us $8k and my relative would've needed 16 infusions.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] BussyCat@lemmy.world 2 points 6 hours ago

So there is also an out of pocket maximum which is the most you’ll pay in a calendar year no matter how much your expenses are which vary by insurance plans but in my experience have generally been between 5-15k with 15k being for much cheaper insurance and 5k being for better insurance so if you have 1m in medical expenses and copay would be 200k it would instead be just that max out of pocket of approximately 10k, which while not great is much more manageable. The unfortunate thing is that is tied to the year so if you start treatment in November and finish treatment in March that 10k per calendar year turns into 20k since it was over the course of 2 years

[-] vivalapivo@lemmy.today 1 points 22 minutes ago

max out of pocket

That's what I've been missing all this time.

Bottom line is:

If you have income above the poverty line, say $2k/mo, don't pay the insurance fee for some reason (the income is from something shady like onlyfans or etsy), you don't have a disability, and you're younger than 65 - only then you can get million dollars bill.

Otherwise, cancer treatment could cost you up to $15-30k and sometimes even be free.

this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2025

30 points (94.1% liked)

Asklemmy

48986 readers

612 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 6 years ago

MODERATORS