Politics & News & Social Justice15 Feb 2006 10:25 am
A Cancer Drug Shows Promise, at a Price That Many Can’t Pay
by Angry White LiberalThis shows the need for the Federal Government to step in and negotiate directly with drug manufacturers.
Doctors are excited about the prospect of Avastin, a drug already widely used for colon cancer, as a crucial new treatment for breast and lung cancer, too. But doctors are cringing at the price the maker, Genentech, plans to charge for it: about $100,000 a year.
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One Response to “A Cancer Drug Shows Promise, at a Price That Many Can’t Pay”
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February 18th, 2006 at 10:55 am
Drug manufacturers will continue to charge what the market (in this case cancer patients) cannot bear as long as they can get the price they ask for. Of course people become outraged by this and demand that the government do something to help people get the medication they need. The only pity is that we aren’t outraged enough to organize ourselves and insist that the government either negotiate drug prices for all poor and elderly Americans supported in public entitlement programs (the easiest, most fiscally responsible, and most incremental thing they could do) or really live up to its propoganda about the global economy and enable Americans to buy the medications they need on the world market where the costs are actually affordable. The second scenario raises concerns about drug quality and the effect on American dollars on the cost of everyone else’s drug prices, but are not completely insurmountable. I buy my own medications not from Canada, but from India–which manufactures approximately 25 percent of the active ingredients in drugs marketed by U.S. pharmaceutical companies. I only have my own story to report here, but I can tell you that the price for medicines (for the same health concerns and having the same effectiveness) is about 20 times cheaper when I buy them in India.