Lung Cancer Screening: Benefits, Costs, and Opportunity Costs for the Public Health

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In a rather unusual action, the National Cancer Institute (NCI), a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), issued a press release on November 4, 2010 announcing preliminary findings from a research study that, at that time had yet to be published (it since has been). This bulletin, Lung cancer trial results show mortality benefit with low-dose CT, announces that a large, multi-center, randomized controlled trial (RCT), called, the National Lung Screening Trial (NLST), has found that regular screening of current and former heavy smokers with low-dose chest computed tomography (CT) scanning aged 55-74, compared to screening by regular chest x-ray, led to 20% fewer deaths from lung cancer. It is unusual in that it is there is no associated published study in a journal describing these results (the statement says that it is being “prepared for publication in a peer-reviewed journal within the next few months”); the only concurrently published article is a description of the methods of the NLST study, with discussion of previous screening studies for lung cancer, is the “National lung screening trial: overview and study design” published in the November issue of Radiology and made available November 2, 2010.

The study comparing these two screening tests – x-ray and CT – appears very strong. Because it is randomized, there is no significant difference between the pre-existing characteristics of those assigned to CT versus chest x-ray screening, and because the end point is death, it largely eliminates one of the most important confounding issues in prior studies called “lead time bias”. This means that if a more sensitive test identifies cancer earlier in its course, the time between diagnosis and death will be longer even if the death itself is not forestalled. (E.g., you have cancer and one test finds it at 55 and you die at 60; another test could find it at 50 and you die at 60; finding the cancer earlier didn’t make you live longer.) It is also a very large study (53,000 people) and well designed in many other ways, so that a 20% reduction in death is important. There is an excellent FAQ for this study, including graphics of lead-time and length-time bias, at the NCI website

So is there any problem? Will lung cancer, the biggest killer among cancers, become like breast cancer, where a screening test can find the cancer earlier, lead to earlier and effective treatment, and decrease mortality? Not exactly. In addition to a 20% reduction in mortality being far less than the reduction in breast cancer mortality from mammography, lung cancer is not breast cancer; we know the cause of the vast majority of cases: smoking. The authors, and the NCI, emphasize that such screening, even if widely adopted, is no substitute for stopping smoking or increasing efforts to get people to stop smoking. The real question is what is the benefit of spending huge amounts of money (while there is no statement of cost of screening in either the NCI brief or the Radiology article, estimates are as much as $12 billion a year -- 30 million screened at $400 per CT screening with interpretation, including follow-up exams -- to screen people who smoke, or smoked, heavily for cancer in pursuit of a significant, but relatively small, reduction in mortality? Moreover, there is no estimate of the potential risk of repeated CT scans (even low-dose, such as studied) and the degree to which the existence of a screening test might decrease the interest of smokers in stopping. (If this seems perverse, it is almost certain to happen; it happens every time news of a possible preventive intervention is announced: some people decide there is no need to stop their risky behavior.) Thus, to save 1 in 300 lives (about 100,000 of the 30 million screened, or 0.039% of the US population), not even considering quality of life (generally low for long-term smokers with cancer who have other conditions such as chronic lung disease), will cost about $40 per every person in the US per year.

How do we evaluate cost-benefit? In the current political environment, the popular theme is “don’t spend public money”, but there is always the implicit caveat “except if it benefits me” – and in this country we have over 300 million “me’s”. Dr. Robert Bowman, who has previously contributed to this blog, describes for us the potential alternative uses of not only the ongoing cost of screening, but even the cost of the study itself:

· The $250 million for this one study involving CT screening for lung cancer is about what the United States spent for all Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) health care cost, quality, and outcomes research in 2008. (AHRQ is the main government agency looking at these issues, including “outcomes”, particularly important as I have previously discussed; it is obviously funded at a lot less than the $30 billion for NIH.)

· $250 million is the entire sum that the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA, the government agency that funds workforce research, training programs in primary care, dentistry, physicians assistants, pipeline programs, etc.) could scrape together to address emergent needs for primary care workforce this year.

· $250 million, if used to train family doctors at about $30,000 cost per Standard Primary Care provider, would produce 8333 Standard primary care years of workforce in family medicine graduates, or about 333 FM physicians serving their entire careers and improving cost, quality, and access where it is most needed.[1]

And the $12 billion?

· The $12 billion a year spent on CT screening for 30 million current or former smokers could graduate 16,000 family physicians a year.

· $12 billion a year, expended each year for the 30 years required to actually build any workforce (i.e., a generation), if applied to family medicine would supply the entire nation enough primary care for all locations and populations in need of primary care. Sufficient primary care for over 90% of Americans in all needed locations would begin 30 years after reaching 16,000 annual graduates and would be maintained with continued funding of 16,000 annual graduates. (Indeed, compared to less-efficient spending on training programs, such as internal medicine, that yield far fewer primary care years per dollar spent, this $12 billion is actually is a savings of a few billion dollars!)

Or, if we are concerned about lung cancer, using this for tobacco control campaigns, both the "stop smoking" kind and the legislating non-smoking venues, cities and states.

Dr. Bowman continues:
"The US continues to fail, time after time, in the most basic choices regarding care for Americans most in need of care. The US can focus on the health care needed for nearly all people nearly all of the years of their lives in nearly all locations or the US can continue to spend its $7000 per person ($2.5 trillion) on the health care needs for only some of its people for a only a few years of their lives, with health care delivery services concentrated in only a limited number of locations (4% of the land area).

There is little point to research about rural workforce, health access, or primary care until the nation makes a decision to quit sending health care spending to locations with top concentrations for the care of Americans already with the most care."

Any economist – or wise investor or businessperson – can tell you about “opportunity cost”. This means “if you spend money on one thing, you can’t spend it on something else.” Therefore, the benefit of what you spend money on needs to be looked at not only for its intrinsic value (“will spending $12 billion a year on lung cancer screening with CT save lives?”) or against a very limited range of options (“Is it more cost effective than screening with chest x-rays?”) but weighed against reasonable alternative strategies to improving the health of people – all people.

Dr. Bowman gives strong arguments for the benefit of investing in primary care workforce development, and particularly in family medicine. Maybe there are other strategies for most improving the health of most of our people. But looking at new scientific advances in isolation is clearly a flawed approach.

[1] For a detailed description both of this measure – standard primary care (SPC) years – and the reasons that Family Medicine, as opposed to other physician and non-physician primary care training (internal medicine, pediatrics, physician’s assistants, nurse practitioners) is the most efficient producer of SPC years, see Ten Biggest Myths Regarding Primary Care in the Future, January 15, 2009.
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Top Ten Reasons for Future Subspecialist Physicians To Be Concerned

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This guest piece, by Robert Bowman, MD, of the AT Still School of Osteopathic Medicine in Mesa, AZ, can be considered to be a sequel to his guest blog from January 15, 2009, Ten Biggest Myths Regarding Primary Care in the Future. In that piece, Dr. Bowman discussed how, of the five primary care training “forms” (General Pediatrics, General Internal Medicine, Family Medicine, Nurse Practitioners and Physician assistant) only family physician provided enough “Standard Primary Care Years” per graduate, and distributed to the areas in which people live, to provide sufficient primary care. In this piece, he presents information on how the change in the workforce is likely to have an even greater impact on subspecialists.
I think that this is very timely. The idea that family physicians, or primary care doctors in general, will be “replaced” by nurse practitioners and/or physician’s assistants keeps rearing its ugly head despite evidence to the contrary. Dr. Bowman demonstrates that reimbursement policies that pay far more for “partialism” encourage both physicians and non-physicians to enter subspecialist practice. We still do and will need more primary care and it is not going to happen by magic. It is going to happen by changing reimbursement policies. (See, for example, Mary Carmichael's "The Doctor Won't See You Now", in Newsweek, Feb 26, 2010).

The first two graphics demonstrate trends in the number of primary care providers by "form" if there were not movement into subspecialism, and what the real trend will be.
The final graphic compares the retention in primary care, over time, for the different "forms" based on whether they are more "permanent choice" primary care (e.g., family medicine) or "flexible choice" (e.g., internal medicine).

10. “Midlevel” Growth: Nursing leaders have promised to deliver health access where it was most needed and received numerous concessions to move beyond nursing but have largely left health access behind along with basic nursing. Nursing leaders continue to promise primary care while nurse practitioners steadily depart primary care to become specialty workforce and appear poised to become “nurse doctors” (DNPs). There is every reason to believe that DNPs will be no more – and probably less – likely to practice in underserved or rural areas at greater rates than current NPs. Physician assistant leaders are likely to follow the independent "successes" of nursing. Future subspecialist physicians will face competition no other physician subspecialists have ever had to face.

9. Increasing NP, IM, Ped entry into subspecialties. About 40% more nurse practitioner, 50% more internal medicine, and 60% more pediatric graduates are entering specialty workforce compared to a 10 - 15 years ago, and specialization rates have continued to increase. In addition, more internists and nurse practitioners convert from primary care to specialty care in the years after graduation.

8. Increasing PA production, also entering subspecialties. Over 220% more new physician assistant graduates are entering the sub-specialty workforce, increasing from fewer than 1500 in 1998 to over 4600 in 2008. The percentages in emergency care, orthopedic, and surgical subspecialties are now greater than those in primary care. Physician assistants also are converting from primary care to specialty care after graduation. Only 28% of 2008 graduates entered primary care in AAPA surveys.

7. Postive Cost-Benefit ratio for “midlevel subspecialists. Nurse practitioner and physician assistant graduates have lower employment costs than subspecialist physicians. It is possible for 2 or 3 NP or PA subspecialists to generate more revenue than one subspecialist physician for less cost of salary, benefits, and other physician perks.

6. Increased “midlevels” in subspecialties decrease need for more subspecialist physicians. More and better nurses, assistants, and other health care team members are recruited to subspecialty workforce because the higher reimbursement for subspecialty services as compared to primary care allows these subspecialists to pay them more. Physician assistants and nurse practitioners are on track to increase to 450,000 that are more than 70% subspecialty care. The US is moving to a specialty workforce that can deliver more specialty care with fewer specialty physicians.

5.Increasing US graduates likely will further increase subspecialist production. US graduates deliver twice the workforce of non-citizen international medical graduates due to delays in entry and departures from the US workforce after graduation. Expansions of US medical schools are likely to replace more non-citizens with US origin graduates. This replacement results in twice the specialty workforce for each position transitioned from a non-citizen to a US origin graduate.

4. Increasing subspecialist production of US Medical Schools. The United States produces 40 - 50% more subspecialist workforce from each type of medical school compared to a decade ago. Currently no one can estimate just how much specialty workforce will be produced as the annual graduates entering the workforce continue to increase with higher percentages found entering specialty care in physicians and in non-physicians.

3. Threats to very high subspecialist reimbursement. To the extent that there is any decrease in subspecialist reimbursement, these physicians will face the possibility of longer hours, more services, less vacation, and more years of work per subspecialist physician.

2.Supply, demand, and cost of care. All physicians will be blamed for continued health care cost increases as all levels of government and all businesses and all of the US people pick up the tab. There is potential for even more costs with subspecialists increasing services to compensate for an oversupply of subspecialists.

1. And, finally, when the United States finally invests in sufficient primary care substantially fewer visits will be needed in specialty offices.

Add to this
· the steadily increasing disconnect between subspecialist physicians separated from their patients by additional assistants
· the admission patterns of medical schools favoring upper-income students leading to subspecialists with ever more exclusive origins who are less and less like lower and middle income Americans .

In other words, our medical education leaders and medical association leaders and subspecialists...
...will probably never see it coming.

Robert C. Bowman, M.D., rcbowman@atsu.edu

Only those unable, those unaware, or those with another agenda fail to understand that solutions for basic health access have worked for over one hundred years.

http://www.basichealthaccess.org/ http://www.physicianworkforcestudies.org/ http://www.ruralmedicaleducation.org/

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