This article originally appeared on heartland.org.
Drug manufacturer Merck recently won approval from the Food and Drug Administration for its new “game-changing” treatment – Keytruda – for late-stage melanoma, a deadly skin cancer. Keytruda offers “unprecedented response rates” for patients with late stage melanoma who otherwise face a death sentence, according to a September 8 analysis by Colin White, lead analyst for oncology at Datamonitor Healthcare.
Though the treatment is a potential lifesaver, the cost – $12,500 per month over an average of six months [SI1] – is likely to ruffle some feathers.
Other high-cost treatments for hepatitis c and a rare form of leukemia have also generated anger from insurance industry trade groups, patients, and doctors. But focusing only on the cost of these drugs without considering their benefits may be misleading.
Tomas Phillipson, a public policy professor and health economist at the University of Chicago, says critics of these high drug prices are missing the point. Discussing Gilead Pharmaceutical’s Sovaldi, which costs $84,000 for a full treatment and has been praised as being nearly a cure for hepatitis c, Phillipson said “$84,000 upfrontis expensive, but not for living without hepatitis C.”
States and insurance companies clamp down on expensive medicines
While the benefits to patients of high-priced medicines may seem obvious, not everyone is happy to see them. Insurance companies in particular have voiced concerns about the costs, as have state Medicaid programs.
One state, Illinois, developed a set of 25 criteria to determine in what cases the state’s Medicaid program would pay for the drug. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Arvind Goyal, medical director of Illinois’ Department of Health Care and Family Services defended the decision, saying “On one hand, I recognize that everybody should be able to get reasonable medical…[but] if we decide that the cost doesn’t matter…then we’ve become irresponsible and irrational.”
According to Columbia Business School professor Frank Lichtenberg “demonstrating benefits requires good data and careful analysis.” So while the value of new treatments may be significant – Lichtenberg argues in a forthcoming paper pharmaceutical innovation has resulted in savings “three times as large as the cost of new drugs consumed” – the prices are upfront, and more visible.
Critics of high-priced drugs, however, contend the prices are still simply too much. Earlier this year in a May 22 interview on CNBC, Express Scripts’ chief medical officer Dr. Steve Miller put it bluntly: “[Drug companies] are taking a premium on top of a premium, and we think that’s not sustainable.” And last year over 100 oncologists penned an article in the medical journal Blood stating “the unsustainable drug prices in [chronic myeloid leukemia] and cancer may be causing harm to patients.”
Little appetite for price controls
Despite the concerns over high drug prices, few are willing to suggest price controls on prescription drugs.
“I don’t think our country is ready to stomach drug negotiations and drug regulations to that extent,” drug industry consultant Lauren Barnes, senior vice president of Avalere Health, said in the same CNBC article Express Scripts’ Dr. Miller made his comments in.
Instead, payers in the insurance and benefits industries are trying to use their market power to leverage lower prices, including plans to switch patients to lower-cost options expected to be approved in the coming months and years.
Another potential way to address the high cost of drugs may be in the development of innovative financial products.
In a July 2014 Forbes op-ed, former FDA Commissioner Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach and University of Chicago health economist Phillipson make the case credit markets can help defer some of these large costs over time.
While some credit instruments exist for health care, the interest rates can often be very high. But better financing mechanisms that might even include government guarantees could help make the interest rates less burdensome. “Just as there would be fewer home purchased if the full value of a house had to be paid up front without mortgages,” write Von Eschenbach and Phillipson, “…public and personal health will suffer needlessly unless we develop better credit mechanisms for patients and payers in health care.”
Yevgeniy Feyman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He can be reached at [email protected]
