Jyotsana Saha
In the past 5 years, 15 new cancer drugs have entered the market with price tags of at least $10,000. This is indicative of trends in costs of medicine. According to a recent article that digs into costs, experimental cholesterol drugs could cost $10,000 a year, and a drug for cystic fibrosis is priced at about $300,000 a year. The list goes on.
The unsustainably rising costs are raising the stakes for patients, often pushing them to bankruptcy. A recent story by NBC on Lauren Baumann, a 30-year old mother living in Kentucky who lives with chronic myeloid leukemia, conveys the widespread struggle. She has to spend close to $2,000 a month for her medication, which she will have to take for the rest of her life, and which has tripled in wholesale price since entering the market in 2001. To put this into perspective, she pays about twice the average mortgage payment in the U.S. to access medicines that help her manage her disease.
Rather than accept this as the “new normal”, there are people proposing solutions. How can we change this?
Dr. Peter Bach, director of Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Center for Health Policy and Outcomes, suggests linking price of medicines to performance. While there are challenges to implementing this kind of model in different markets, it has been implemented in several European state-run health systems. Others propose looking at alternative ways to fund R&D, which is a major cost driver. Dr. Leonard Saltz – chief of Gastrointestinal Oncology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center – has suggested allowing Medicare, the largest purchaser of drugs in the US, to negotiate prices directly with pharmaceutical companies.
Perhaps curbing the rising costs of medicine first starts with building a public voice on this issue, and that is certainly in play around the world. That is our aim at Access Our Medicine: build a collective voice across all stakeholders as a call for transformative ideas and models that could ensure that life-changing medicines are made more affordable to all in the near future. The solutions are by no means straightforward, but they are within reach.
You can add your voice to the call for affordable medicine here.
