They suggest letting Medicare negotiate prices, back grassroots movement calling for change
WebMD News from HealthDay
By Robert Preidt
HealthDay Reporter
THURSDAY, July 23, 2015 (HealthDay News) -- Soaring costs for cancer drugs are hurting patient care in the United States, a group of top oncologists claim.
"High cancer-drug prices are affecting the care of patients with cancer and our health care system," Dr. Ayalew Tefferi, a hematologist at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., said in a Mayo news release.
Tefferi and his colleagues made a number of
recommendations on how to address the problem in a commentary published
July 23 in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings.
Allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices is one of the suggestions the team of 118 leading cancer experts offered as a possible solution.
Along with their recommendations, the group also
expressed support for a patient-based grassroots movement on change.org
that is demanding action on the issue.
"The average gross household income in the U.S. is
about $52,000 per year. For an insured patient with cancer who needs a
drug that costs $120,000 per year, the out-of-pocket expenses could be
as much as $25,000 to $30,000 -- more than half their average household
income," Tefferi explained in the news release.
A study published earlier this year in the Journal of Economic Perspectives found that cancer drug prices have increased an average of $8,500 a year over the past 15 years.
"When you consider that cancer will affect one in three individuals over their lifetime, and [with] recent trends in insurance
coverage [that] put a heavy financial burden on patients with
out-of-pocket expenses, you quickly see that the situation is not
sustainable," Tefferi said. "It's time for patients and their physicians
to call for change."
The changes the commentary called for included:
- Create a review mechanism after a drug has been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration that would propose a fair price for new cancer drugs that is based on the value to patients and health care.
- Allow the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute -- established under the Affordable Care Act -- to evaluate the benefits of new cancer therapies, and let similar organizations include drug prices in their assessments of a treatment's value.
- Permit patients to import cancer drugs from other countries. For example, prices in Canada are about half that of prices in the United States, the experts said.
- Pass legislation to prevent drug companies from delaying the introduction of generic drugs, and reform the patent system to make it more difficult to unnecessarily extend patent protection of a drug.
- Encourage groups that represent cancer specialists and patients to consider the overall value of drugs and treatments when developing their treatment guidelines.
The group wrote that "it should be possible to focus
the attention of pharmaceutical companies on this problem and to
encourage our elected representatives to more effectively advocate for
the interests of their most important constituents among the
stakeholders in cancer -- American cancer patients."
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