Healthy Skepticism Library item: 5624
Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.
Publication type: news
Brenner B.
Biotech Therapy Pricing—A New Barrier to Access to Care
Breast Cancer Action 2006 Jun 28
www.bcaction.org/Pages/SearchablePages/2006Newsletters/Newsletter091F.html
Notes:
Ralph Faggotter’s Comments:
“…several pharmaceutical and biotech companies-including Merck and Genentech-announced their intention to price their drugs according to their value to patients. This new pricing approach, which we at BCA are calling “social value pricing,†basically involves pricing their drugs on the basis of, among other things, on 1. what the market will bear and…”
The new “ Bleed them dry until they die! “ approach to cancer patients by elements in the pharmaceutical industry has been shocking, not so much for its overt callousness, but more for the failure of public, journalistic, medical or political outrage to materialize and force a back-down by the companies.
Has society really become this indifferent towards the suffering of others?
Full text:
Newsletter #91–June/July 2006
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Biotech Therapy Pricing-A New Barrier to Access to Care
In articles that ran, appropriately enough, on the business pages of newspapers recently, several pharmaceutical and biotech companies-including Merck and Genentech-announced their intention to price their drugs according to their value to patients. This new pricing approach, which we at BCA are calling “social value pricing,” basically involves pricing their drugs on the basis of, among other things, on
1. what the market will bear and 2. the company’s interpretation of the drugs’ perceived value to patients and society.Susan Desmond-Hellman, president of product development at Genentech was quoted in a February 15, 2006, New York Times article as saying that the company prices its biotech drugs by ‘’the value of innovation and the value of new therapies.’’ Herceptin, a Genentech product that is a breakthrough for some women with HER2-positive breast cancer, costs around $48,000 per year in the United States. Avastin, an anti-angiogenesis cancer therapy approved for colon cancer and soon to be approved for breast cancer is expected to be priced, for breast cancer, at $100,000 a year.
In the United Kingdom, where Herceptin has just been approved for patients in the national health care system, the annual cost of the drug will eat up one-quarter of the national bill for cancer drugs. That’s just one drug. And there is much talk in the scientific cancer meetings world of the value of combining biotech therapies to achieve better outcomes.
BCA believes that Genentech, which is a leader in so many things in the cancer world, should take leadership in the fair pricing of its cancer therapies. Doing so would assure that everyone who might benefit will be able to get needed drugs, and that the already tottering health care system will not completely be bankrupted by the cost of emerging biotech therapies.
If you are interested in working with BCA on this critically important issue, please contact BCA’s community organizer, Pauli Ojea, at 415/243-9301, ext. 11 (toll free 877/278-6722) or pojea@bcaction.org.
- Barbara Brenner
