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Your Money or Your Life: The High Cost of Life Saving Drugs
There is something profoundly wrong with charging whatever the traffic will bear for a life-saving drug when the alternative is certain death.
A group of about 120 leading hematology-oncology specialists from 15 countries in 5 continents published an article in the journal Blood on April 15, 2013. It is titled “Price of drugs for chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), reflections of the unsustainable cancer drug prices: the perspective of CML experts.”
As Andrew Pollack reported in the NYT on April 25, 2013:
“The doctors and researchers, who specialize in the potentially deadly blood cancer known as chronic myeloid leukemia, contend in a commentary published online by a medical journal Thursday that the prices of drugs used to treat that disease are astronomical, unsustainable and perhaps even immoral.
They suggested that charging high prices for a medicine needed to keep someone alive is profiteering, akin to jacking up the prices of essential goods after a natural disaster”
Strong words indeed, coming from physicians and researchers not known for inflammatory statements. These are people who are in the trenches, daily bearing witness to the tragedy of patients pushed to bankruptcy in order to buy…
