Cancer mortality reductions were greatest among countries where cancer care spending rose the most, 1995-2007.

Health care spending and health outcomes vary markedly across countries, but the association between spending and outcomes remains unclear. This inevitably raises questions as to whether continuing growth in spending is justified, especially relative to the rising cost of cancer care. We compared cancer care across sixteen countries over time, examining changes in cancer spending and two measures of cancer mortality (amenable and excess mortality). We found that compared to low-spending health systems, high-spending systems had consistently lower cancer mortality in the period 1995-2007. Similarly, we found that the countries that increased spending the most had a 17 percent decrease in amenable mortality, compared to 8 percent in the countries with the lowest growth in cancer spending. For excess mortality, the corresponding decreases were 13 percent and 9 percent. Additionally, the rate of decrease for the countries with the highest spending growth was faster than the all-country trend. These findings are consistent with the existence of a link between higher cancer spending and lower cancer mortality. However, further work is needed to investigate the mechanisms that underlie this correlation.