Doctors Press For Action To Lower ‘Unsustainable’ Prices For Cancer Drugs
Doctors Press For Action To Lower ‘Unsustainable’ Prices For Cancer Drugs
Anyone who’s fought cancer knows that it’s not just scary, but pricey, too.
“A lot of my patients cry — they’re frustrated,” says Dr. Ayalew Tefferi, a hematologist at the Mayo Clinic. “Many of them spend their life savings on cancer drugs and end up being bankrupt.”
The average U.S. family makes $52,000 annually. Cancer drugs can easily cost a $120,000 a year. Out-of-pocket expenses for the insured can run $25,000 to $30,000 — more than half of a typical family’s income.
“These drug prices are completely unsustainable,” Tefferi says. “Pharmaceutical companies are in greed mode, and it’s sad. It’s what I call completely unregulated.”
According to a 2013 study, these steep drug prices cause about 10 to 20 percent of cancer patients to skip or compromise the prescribed treatment. Another studyfound that the launch price of cancer drugs, adjusted for inflation, increased by an average of $8,500 a year between 1995 and 2013.
To make the point, Tefferi recruited 117 other doctors from across the U.S. who share his concerns. Together, they agreed on seven recommendations to make cancer drugs affordable that they want the federal government to consider. The recommendations are laid out in a commentary Thursday in the journal Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
The proposals include allowing the importation of cancer drugs across the U.S. border. Drugs are cheaper in other countries, like Canada, they argue, so why not let people with cancer bring them in for personal use?
They also favor legislation that would stop drug companies from delaying access to cheaper generic versions of their drugs. Tefferi points to Gleevec, or imatinib generically, as an example. It’s used to treat chronic myelogenous leukemia and some other cancers. “That drug should have gone generic three or four years ago,” he says. “But Novartis is doing all sorts of maneuvers to prevent it.”
The doctors recommend a change that could have an even bigger effect: creating a committee to review newly approved cancer drugs and propose a fair price based on their benefits.
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Source: Berlin NPR News STation
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