Bloomberg News
by Anna Edney
26 Apr 13
Of the 12 cancer medications approved by the Food and Drug Administration last year, 11 cost more than $100,000 annually, the physicians said in an article in Blood, the journal of the American Society of Hematology, published online.
The paper highlights the debate over how much leeway drugmakers such as Pfizer Inc. should have in setting the prices of new cancer medicines and whether pricing practices harm patients and health-care systems. While companies should be allowed to profit, a product that can help a patient survive should be priced affordably, the cancer specialists wrote.
“Hopes that the fundamentals of a free market economy and market competition will settle cancer drug prices at lower levels have not been fulfilled,” the doctors said in the paper released yesterday.
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The paper was written by doctors who are specialists in chronic myeloid leukemia, which accounts for about 10 percent of the 48,610 new leukemia cases estimated by the National Cancer Institute. The survival rate hovers at about 60 percent for the disease in the U.S., compared with 80 percent in Sweden. Costs in Sweden are managed and patients may be more likely to comply with treatment while they don’t have the same cost concerns as U.S. patients, the doctors said.
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Gleevec, the standard treatment for chronic myeloid leukemia patients, started off at a price of $30,000 a year when it was approved in 2001 and has tripled in cost, the doctors wrote.
http://washpost.bloomberg.com/Story?...RCT8LR1PK13E90
