“Here they go again” – 3 new proton beam facilities w/in 40 miles in DC-Baltimore

“When it comes to reining in health care spending, it still seems like each hospital administrator thinks the guy at the other hospital should do it.”  That was the lead, as Jenny Gold of Kaiser Health News reports that two Washington,DC hospitals – three miles apart – are building expensive proton beam radiation centers for cancer treatment. The two – Johns Hopkins’ Sibley Memorial Hospital and MedStar Health’s Georgetown University Hospital – will also compete with another new facility in downtown Baltimore – about 40 miles away. She explains:

“While the treatment has shown promise for treating brain and spinal tumors in children, the Hopkins facility is explicitly banned from treating pediatric cancers. That’s because Sibley Memorial Hospital doesn’t have a pediatric unit, nor does it have a permission from the city to build one.

(The 3 centers) will all have to turn to treating adult cancers — largely prostate cancer, for which proton therapy hasn’t been proved to improve results for patients or to reduce side effects — to stay profitable.

…

“Neither [Hopkins nor MedStar] should be building,” says Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a former health care adviser to the Obama administration who is now at the University of Pennsylvania. “We don’t have evidence that there’s a need for them in terms of medical care. They’re simply done to generate profits.”

The higher costs of proton services ultimately trickle down to taxpayers, employers and consumers in the form of higher health insurance premiums.

“It’s hard to bend the cost curve when you’re spending a lot of money,” says Emanuel. “These are tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in treatment for interventions that do not improve survival, improve quality of life, decrease side effects or save money.”

There are already 11 proton therapy centers in the U.S., and the Maryland Proton Treatment Center in Baltimore is one of 17 more on the way.

Former Boston medical center CEO Paul Levy wrote on Twitter, “Here they go again.”

In a New York Times editorial last year, Ezekiel Emanuel and Steven Pearson referred to the proliferation of proton beam therapy facilities as “crazy medicine and unsustainable public policy.”

If you missed it, Johns Hopkins Medicine also this week sent out a news release about its robotic surgery system.

We’ve written many past posts about questions of “the medical arms race” concerning both robotic surgery and proton beam therapy.

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