More than 100 cancer specialists issued a statement April 25 condemning the high price of cancer medications, which now can exceed $100,000 a year. “Advocating for lower drug prices is a necessity to save the lives of patients,” they wrote in Blood, the journal of the American Society of Hematology.
The researchers, from 15 countries, focused on the case of Gleevec, a very effective medication used to treat chronic myeloid leukemia. When Gleevec was first introduced in 2001, it was priced at a hefty $30,000 a year. Before Gleevec, the 10-year survival rate for CML was about 20 percent. While the 10-year survival rate has improved to 90 percent, Gleevec now costs over $92,000 a year.
According the commentary, only a minority of those with CML worldwide (as many as 1.5 million people) are receiving Gleevec or another one of the new, more-effective drugs. In developing countries, many doctors advocate for risky bone marrow transplants rather than drug treatment because the one-time transplant is more affordable than long-term medication.
The cancer specialists also indicated that the survival rate for patients in the United States may be lower than it could be, because patients cannot afford the medication. The cost of these medicines is twice as high in the United States as it is in other countries.
Hagop Kantjarian, a researcher at the MD Anderson cancer center in Houston and the principal author of the statement, told CBS News: “The bottom line is what drives the drug price is the corporate profit. The [corporations] decide what the size of the market is and how much they want to make profit. And they price the drug accordingly.”
Some of the doctors who signed onto the statement are engaged in research funded by the pharmaceutical industry. “I am sure I am going to be blackballed,” Kantjarian said. “My research career will be hurt.”
Prices becoming unsustainable
However, Kantatjarian told the New York Times that prices “are getting to the point where it is becoming unsustainable.”
Many of those who signed onto the statement were inspired by a protest led by doctors at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who in 2012 refused to use a new colon cancer drug that was twice as expensive as another drug, although no more effective.
The Sloan-Kettering doctors’ protest worked in that the drug company responded by cutting the price.
These oncologists are doing what all doctors are supposed to do: defending the best interests of their patients. Having cancer is bad enough. It is an outrage that the price of lifesaving medicines is allowed to go up based on the law of supply and demand so that a drug company can increase its profit, even if it means some patients cannot afford the medication and thus will die. However, this is the logic of the capitalist system. Ultimately, for the health of people and the planet, capitalism must be eradicated and replaced by socialism, a system that puts people’s needs first.
