Cancer ‘breakthroughs’ cost too much, do too little
By Laura Beil, Newsweek
In his more than 35 years of practice, Dr. Lowell Schnipper has seen a lot of women die from breast cancer. A patient’s options start to dwindle by the time tumor cells set up outposts in the bones, lungs, and other organs, defying all attempts to keep them under control.
But in June, when the government approved Perjeta, Schnipper had something new to offer. The drug is one of an innovative class of drugs known as “targeted therapies.”
As the chief of oncology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Schnipper knew Perjeta was not a cure: added to a standard treatment with Herceptin—another targeted therapy that was hailed as a breakthrough in 1998—Perjeta gives the average woman only about six months more of calm before her disease starts to stir again.
Given the limited benefit, the price was startling. For most women, a full course of the drug combination will cost $188,000—enough, he says, “to give anybody a cold sweat.”
Americans spent more than $23 billion last year for cancer drugs, more than we paid for prescriptions to treat anything else. But many oncologists are starting to question what we are getting in return for that bill, whether the war on cancer has become too much of a race to produce the next blockbuster.
“In general, progress for cancer has been halting and slow,” says David Howard of the Department of Health Policy and Management at Emory University. So far, most new drugs offer only marginal extensions of life and few cures. Howard says new so-called breakthroughs “overpromise and underdeliver.”
Consider the popularity of Avastin, a targeted drug approved for metastatic colon cancer in 2004. A recent study found that almost 70 percent of patients on chemotherapy were receiving Avastin within a year of its release. In clinical trials, the drug increased survival by about five months. The cost? About $10,000 a month.
Treating cancer has never been cheap, but today, the price of each new treatment seems to outpace the one before, with little bearing on its efficacy.
According to figures from insurer United Healthcare, a standard cocktail of drugs for treating lung cancer used to run about $1,000 a month. Today’s regimens cost from more than $6,000 to almost $10,000—for about two more months of life.
“There is no such thing as a cancer drug coming on the market that is some sort of regular drug price,” says Dr. Peter Bach of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who studies the impact of cancer costs on U.S. health care. “They’re all priced at spectacularly high levels.”
Which leads to an unsettling question: how much is a little more time worth? Would you spend $50,000 for four more months? How about $15,000 for two weeks?
Of three frontiers in cancer treatment, targeted therapies like Perjeta are widely seen as the best hope for a cure. Traditional chemotherapy is notorious for side effects because it wields destruction indiscriminately throughout the body. Targeted therapies are designed to hit cancer cells only. Perjeta, for example, targets a protein produced in excess amounts in some breast cancers; Avastin hinders the ability of a tumor to form new blood vessels to feed itself.
Marijuana kills cancer cells. In 2003 I wrote an article called “New Study Explains How Pot Kills Cancer Cells.” If you Google that story, you’ll find there are 500,000 references and my article was even featured in a BBC documentary.
The cost of medicine, especially for the elderly, is bankrupting our nation. There will be limits to treatment when the government takes over our health care. There is no answer to this dilemma as the cost of medical care pushes 20% of GDP.
The US has known since 1972 that pot kills cancer, but has repressed these findings. Today, over 1,000 peer reviewed studies confirm that cannabis shrinks the blood supply to tumors, kills cancer cells, and prevents cancer cells from multiplying. Millions of people have died horrible deaths and in many cases, familes exhausted their savings on dangerous, toxic and expensive drugs. Now we are just beginning to realize that while marijuana has never killed anyone, marijuana prohibition has killed millions.
…for the love of God will everyone please educate themselves on the Affordable Health Act.
No government ‘takeover’
No death squads
…in fact it REMOVES limits on your coverage.
It’s the hospitals and doctors who don’t like it and for good reason as it will limit payouts to them.
The answer is to educate yourself with real facts , not FAUX facts.
As Paul Ryan has stated, be part of the solution or you’re part of the problem.
Mr. zitts,
There IS an answer to the soaring cost of health care….it’s called: take care of your health! Most of the diseases we as a nation spend those millions of dollars on are preventable, lifestyle diseases related to obesity and lack of exercise. When more people start paying attention to and monitoring what they eat and make sure that they get regular exercise, our nations health care costs will stabilize.
Most cancer centers now include lifestyle modificcations in the educational part of treatment. Green tea, exercse, a little red wine, and no smoking are the basics.
There have been major improvements in cancer detection and new treatment modalities, and yes they are expensive. Drug development takes about 13 yyears and many millions of dollars, and unfortunately our government has cut researh dollars to the quik. Many clinical trials are now being done outside of the US to save on development costs. As a cancer research advocatte, my colleagues always try to address these issues of cost, funding, research protocols and most important – human subject protections as well as the patient perspective. These arre really difficult issues for all, but please know that cancer research advocates have a respected “seat at the table”‘ Hopefully we will see the day when cancer is managed as a chronic illness’