Samantha Watson Discusses Cancer's Financial Impact on Young Adults

Cancer care and its associated costs can combine with everyday bills to create a significant financial burden, especially for young adults with cancer, said Samantha Watson, founder and CEO of The Samfund.

Transcript (slightly modified)

How does the high cost of cancer care impact young adults in particular?

So, the high cost of cancer care affects everybody, right, because medical bills are high, copays are high, ongoing costs of care are high. But there are also the other costs that most people don’t realize also become a burden, like rent and mortgage, like utilities, like groceries and the everyday kind of costs. For young adults especially, that burden is felt a little bit more because of their starting point.

We have a group of people who are starting out potentially with little to nothing in the bank, little to no employment history, and really limited financial stability at best. So if they’re diagnosed at that time and the bills start coming in, the income and expense balance gets thrown so far off that they end up needing to make really difficult decisions between which bills to pay and which bills to skip.

What ends up happening is that either they just take on the cost no matter what, and then they suffer with things like damaged credit, facing bankruptcy, and things like that before they even turn 30 in a lot of cases, or they end up skipping medications, skipping appointments, and sacrificing their self-care.