Who Gets Saved? Hepatitis Cure at $84,000 Makes Doctors Choose

[Purveyor]

By Simeon Bennett and Robert Langreth Jul 23, 2014 12:01 AM ET

Early this year, liver specialist Ken Flora and his colleagues sent letters to 1,300 patients announcing exciting news: powerful new drugs to cure the lethal hepatitis C virus were finally available.

Soon after, some patients received a different message: notices that their health plans were refusing to pay for the $84,000 drug. So far only about 50 of the patients have received the medicine, Gilead Sciences Inc.’s Sovaldi.

Not since AIDS drug cocktails were introduced almost two decades ago has a medical breakthrough set up such a rush for a life-saving but expensive therapy. Constrained by limited budgets, health insurers and government programs are forced to make hard choices about which patients will get the cure. Many are opting to treat only the sickest.

“No one envisioned this drug would cost so much money, so it has knocked back everyone on their heels,” says Flora, who works at The Oregon Clinic, a group of specialists in the Portland area.

This was supposed to be a good year for hepatitis C sufferers. Finally there’s a reliable cure for a disease that is estimated to kill more people than AIDS in the U.S. each year. Instead, it has been one of dashed expectations and treatment envy.

MORE...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-23/doctors-dilemma-who-gets-costly-cure-for-deadly-virus.html

[randys1]

1. I know, we nationalize pharmaceutical industry, continue to provide tremendous

monetary incentives to the inventors of miracle drugs, but cut out the obscene profits for wall street and management who do next to nothing...

then everybody could afford it


BTW, you could apply this model to just about anything...



ps my one and only biological son has Hep C and no money...

[Agschmid]

2. +1

[randys1]

4. Imagine the possibilities, fuel, energy, healthcare, hospitals, internet, etc.

[Agschmid]

3. You should post this in GD.

[hedgehog]

5. Despite the headline - it's not the doctors doing the choosing -

- it's the manufacturer for keeping the price high

- it's the insurance companies refusing coverage

- it's state legislators (and the voters) who prefer lower taxes over better Medicaid coverage.

[trotsky]

6. Correct, and unfortunately these are going to be difficult situations.

Let's theorize that we had a cure for cancer. ALL cancers. But it cost a billion dollars to cure one person.

What could we do?

[hedgehog]

7. I think that that question is a false one -

we already have many cure for cancer that do not cost $1 billion. We do have a problem with pharmaceutical companies concealing actual costs so that we don't know what cancers treatments really cost. Even worse, there are actually doctors out there who act as middlemen - they purchase drugs from the wholesalers, then re-sell them to patients with a nice mark-up!

The question is not how much we are willing to spend on one person; the questions are how much are we willing to spend on health care as opposed to everything else and how much of our health care spending is wasted. There will always be the case of the person with a rare disease that requires gazillions of dollars to treat. I would submit that part of the cost is due to the rarity and that the rarity means that taking care of those few people is not as tremendous a burden as it might seem.

The irony is that the information gained in treating rare diseases often offers insight in how better to treat more common diseases.

[trotsky]

8. Well of course it's an exaggeration, but it illustrates a point.

Our medical technology is incredibly advanced, and will only continue to get more advanced. With this comes increased costs. I want as many people as possible to have access to the best healthcare possible, but what if the math doesn't work?

I don't pretend to know the answers, should we run smack into that problem. But it's a scary problem regardless.