Support the petition for reasonable drug prices.

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I hereby confess that when it comes to healthcare, I am somewhat of a socialist. I feel healthcare should be a right, not a privilege. However, I would draw some sort of line for certain conditions, even including cancer. For example, there is little evidence that 3rd or 4th line therapies for many cancers have any significant impact on survival, yet we often prescribe them for patients who are healthy enough to try them with the rationale that “even a 5% chance” is worth taking. Weighing that 5% chance against a 25% chance of causing further toxicity and NOT improving someone’s quality of life requires sensitive counseling and is part of the “art” of practicing medical oncology. We already don’t pay for cosmetic surgery when it comes to face-lifts, but breast cancer patients enjoy coverage for breast reconstruction, while men with erectile dysfunction following surgery or radiation don’t have coverage in most instances for ED drugs or other treatments. Thus, there is a lot of room for improvement in our health care system. The ACA is not the best answer, but it may provide at least a start through inclusion of coverage for end-of-life counseling and funding of the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute. We should not tolerate having the most expensive health care system on the planet that delivers care that ranks dead last in the developed world.

One of the most disturbing trends in our broken health care system has been the introduction of numerous new cancer drugs that have (in some cases) remarkable activity but are priced beyond any reasonable value consideration. Trying to decide about “value” itself is an extremely challenging undertaking. Numerous articles like this one have proposed guidelines through which value might be better quantified. Now a group of oncology physicians have published a position statement regarding cancer drug costs that deserves your attention. They propose a number of solutions that could help the cancer community move toward the kind of progress made by the AIDS community when they were faced with similar challenges of highly expensive drugs. You should read the whole article to see the context, but their enumerated suggestions are as follows:

• (1)Creating a post-FDA drug approval review mechanism to propose a fair price for new treatments, based on the value to patients and heath care
• (2)Allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices
• (3)Allowing the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, created through the Affordable Care Act initiatives to evaluate the benefits of new treatments, and similar organizations to include drug prices in their assessments of the treatment value
• (4)Allowing importation of cancer drugs across borders for personal use (eg, prices in Canada are about half of prices in the United States)
• (5)Passing legislation to prevent drug companies from delaying access to generic drugs (pay-for-delay)¹³
• (6)Reforming the patent system to make it more difficult to prolong product exclusivity unnecessarily (patent “evergreening”)
• (7)Encouraging organizations that represent cancer specialists and patients (eg, American Society of Clinical Oncology, American Society of Hematology, American Association for Cancer Research, American Cancer Society, National Comprehensive Cancer Network) to consider the overall value of drugs and treatments in formulating treatment guidelines.

If you agree that these actions should become a part of our national discussion, please join me in signing the petition these thoughtful oncology leaders have started. You can click on this link to sign up, and please invite your friends to join you.