Why Cancer Drug Prices Keep Rising in the U.S.
Inside the price tactics of the cancer industrial complex.
By Heather Millar
cancer.nautil.us
Excerpt:
...Cancer drugs cost more in the U.S. than anywhere in the world. But little research has been done comparing drug prices internationally beyond their initial cost, Savage said, so his team took on this task, examining how prices inflate after being introduced here and in the U.K.
The prices for the top 10 cancer drugs are 42 percent higher in the U.S. than they are in the United Kingdom, according to an analysis published by Savage and others in February in the Journal of Oncology Practice. One drug, Pegfilgrastim (Neulasta), a medication that helps the body make white blood cells, which defend against infection and disease after cancer treatments, costs more than four times as much in the United States. And prices for all the drugs described in the study continue to rise in the U.S., at an average of 8.8 percent each year, while in the U.K. it was 0.24 percent—“six drugs had unchanged prices, two had decreased prices, and two had modest price increases.”
This means the expensive drugs may be out of reach for American patients who have mediocre insurance, or who don’t have it at all. I have interviewed people who’ve chosen to stop their cancer treatment rather than pay for drugs that will end up leaving their families destitute. In the U.K., though, once the price for a drug has been set, it usually remains static, Savage said. Prices usually go down after introduction, and can only be increased with government consent, or in light of new evidence that the drug is somehow more effective than originally thought, or that the drug has a new application, say, for treating a different disease, or a different stage of disease, or for helping more patients than originally envisioned.
“Each one of these drugs is expensive. Many are used in combination with another expensive drug, or after another expensive drug,” Savage said, “though none of them cure anybody. Advances in care are coming more rapidly than the ability of the countries and the patients to pay for them.”
Indeed, approximately 50 new anti-cancer agents have been introduced in the past five years alone to fight different types of cancer. And, as Savage put it in his paper: “The increasing costs of cancer drugs are approaching the limits of sustainability.” That means that healthcare systems and patients may soon be unable to afford them. Ever increasing drug prices place a growing burden on insurance and healthcare costs, and no one benefits from this upward spiral except drug companies. This is not the situation in countries besides the U.S... |
