Is the high cost of CML care "worth it"?

e17801 Background: The high prices of chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) therapy are well recognized, but less discussion has focused on the value of health care spending on the disease. This study examined whether the added costs have been “worth” the benefits in U.S. CML patients. Methods: We analyzed trends in CML cost and survival over time of 8,510 patients using real-world data from the 1994-2009 Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results (SEER)-Medicare linked database and the Truven Health MarketScan database. We estimated life expectancy over a 15-year duration post-diagnosis using Weibull survival modeling and projected the corresponding costs using generalized linear modeling, adjusting for patient characteristics. We estimated population-level survival, health care costs, and incremental cost-effectiveness ratios (ICERs, expressed as cost per life year [LY] gained) separately for patients over 65 (“older”), 65 and under (“younger”), and both populations combined. Results: We found that therapeutic...