“Profits Before Patients”: National Drug Shortages Are Threatening Cancer Patients’ Lives
Millions of Americans battling cancer are facing obstacles to recovery that have nothing to do with the disease’s toll on their bodies. According to a new study, national shortages of cancer drugs are threatening the health of the people who rely on them to stay alive.
According to the survey, presented at an oncology conference in Chicago on Monday, about 83 percent of cancer specialists have experienced a drug shortage at their clinics in the past six months. Of those doctors, 92 percent said the shortage had some effect on their patients’ care.
A little over a third of the doctors facing a shortage ended up switching their patients from a cheaper, generic version of that drug to a more expensive brand-name version. Considering the fact that cancer care is already exorbitantly expensive — Americans battling cancer are twice as likely to wind up bankrupt compared to those who don’t have the disease — that could represent a serious strain on those patients.
But cancer patients are facing much more than potential financial hardship. Thanks to the shortages, some cancer specialists can’t find the drugs their patients need at any price. When that happens, doctors are forced to make some painful choices. Nearly 80 percent reported that they switched patients to a different, and potentially less effective, chemotherapy regimen. Some have been forced to give cancers more time to spread further by delaying patients’ treatment or reducing their doses. And 37 percent of the study’s participants even had to choose between their patients, deciding which ones could receive life-saving medication and which ones would have to go without.
William Li, the executive director of a foundation that sponsors research into blood vessel growth, told USA Today that some hospitals are forced to hold lotteries to decide which patients will be able to receive the cancer drugs that are in short supply. “It baffles the mind that this is happening in a modern society,” Li said, pointing out that the FDA should do more to avert drug shortages.
Currently, drug manufacturers can alert the FDA when they suspect an impending shortage, and the federal agency can take steps to try to mitigate the effect on the market, like approving the same kind of drug from a different manufacturer. But so far, that hasn’t been enough to avert the situation. Largely due to manufacturing errors in drug-production facilities across the country, the U.S. faces limited supplies of everything from ADHD medications to painkillers — and cancer patients end up being hit the hardest.
Much of the blame may lie with powerful pharmaceutical companies. One of the co-authors of the new study, Keerthi Gogineni, noted that cancer doctors are concerned drug manufacturers may be prioritizing the most profitable medications over the most life-saving ones. “Some manufacturers have diverted existing production capacity from less profitable agents to more expensive agents,” Gogineni explained. Similarly, a group of over 100 doctors recently criticized Big Pharma for “causing harm to patients” by continuing to sell cancer drugs at unsustainably high prices.
By: Tara Culp-Ressler, Think Progress, June 3, 2013
“The GOP Trickle Down Effect”: Sequestration Takes A Toll On Cancer And Medicare Patients
A funny thing happened on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show yesterday. The Republican host was complaining about a Washington Post report on sequestration cuts hurting cancer patients in the Medicare program, and told his listeners to ignore the news. “All of this is manufactured and made up,” Limbaugh said. How does he know? Because the sequester didn’t include “any cuts in Medicare,” he added.
And then Limbaugh got a call from a conservative oncologist — in this case, a physician who apparently shares the host’s worldview and has no use for the Washington Post — who conceded that the report is, in fact, accurate, forcing Limbaugh to change the subject.
Sequestration cuts are affecting Medicare — though not as much as some other programs — and as Sarah Kliff explained, cancer clinics really are turning away thousands of patients as a result of the Republican spending cuts.
Oncologists say the reduced funding, which took effect for Medicare on April 1, makes it impossible to administer expensive chemotherapy drugs while staying afloat financially.
Patients at these clinics would need to seek treatment elsewhere, such as at hospitals that might not have the capacity to accommodate them.
Kliff talked to one Long Island oncologist who said he and his staff held an emergency meeting earlier this week and decided they would no longer see one-third of their 16,000 Medicare patients. “It’s a choice between seeing these patients and staying in business,” Jeff Vacirca, chief executive of North Shore Hematology Oncology Associates said.
But if Medicare was supposed to be shielded from the sequestration policy, how is this happening? It has to do with how medical offices are reimbursed for medications that need to be administered by a physician — such as those given to cancer patients.
The New York Daily News reported today:
The so-called sequester cuts will force three-quarters of the thousands of cancer clinics nationwide to start referring Medicare patients to hospitals, according to the American Society of Clinical Oncology and other cancer treatment groups, which have appealed to the White House and Congress for help.
Elderly cancer patients are being hit hard because their drugs are among the handful of pharmaceuticals that were affected by the sequester cuts.
Medicare reimbursed oncologists for the cost of chemo drugs, plus 6%. But under the sequester, the federal government is now providing only 4% on top of the drugs’ cost, which can run $900 to $15,000 for a full course, depending on the cancer.
That 2% difference may not sound like much, but given the costs involved, it’s an enormous pay cut for the cancer clinics, which some are now saying is a prohibitive new expense they can’t afford.
Ted Okon, director of the Community Oncology Alliance, told Kliff, “If you get cut on the service side, you can either absorb it or make do with fewer nurses. This is a drug that we’re purchasing. The costs don’t change and you can’t do without it. There isn’t really wiggle room.”
Note, this doesn’t mean the sequester is necessarily cutting off cancer patients, but rather, it means these patients are being told by their local oncology clinics that they’ll have to seek care at hospitals — where the care will be less efficient and more expensive.
In case anyone’s forgotten, it’s within Congress’ power to simply turn the sequester off. The whole thing could take five minutes. But for now, congressional Republicans have ruled out the possibility of turning it off, and have also ruled out the possibility of a compromise to replace these brutal spending cuts.
With each passing day, we learn of increasingly drastic consequences associated with the policy.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 5, 2013
Conservative Newspeak?: Grover Norquist Compares GOPers Who Support Lifesaving Health Care Programs To Cancer cells
In the annals of Orwellian Newspeak, Grover Norquist, president of the libertarian group Americans for Tax Reform, may have established a new precedent for what kind of logic-defying propaganda is accepted in our political discourse — and for what journalists will uncritically reprint sans context or question.
In Monday’s Washington Post story on how deep the anti-tax fervor runs inside the Republican Party, Norquist is quoted criticizing three Republicans, including Sen. Tom Coburn (Okla.), for considering anything other than cutting government programs like Medicare and Medicaid as a solution to the national debt. As the Post reports it (emphasis mine):
The work of reducing the national debt must be done entirely by shrinking government, he said. Any compromise that includes taxes would hinder that goal and taint the Republican brand.
Norquist compared Coburn, the most outspoken of the Senate trio, to a “malignant” cell in the body politic. “So,” Norquist said, “we use chemo and radiation to protect all the healthy cells around it, so it doesn’t grow and metastasize.”
That’s right, Norquist is unequivocally saying that efforts to preserve health care programs like Medicare and Medicaid that often use chemo and radiation to cure cancer — these efforts are, in fact, the real malignant cancer that require chemo and radiation to kill.
Orwell long ago warned of a political system that would insist with a straight face that “war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.” But my guess is that he never envisioned one of the leaders of a major political party claiming that curing cancer is actually cancer — and my guess is that he certainly never envisioned one of the world’s leading newspapers printing that allegation without at least questioning it’s logic.
By: David Sirota, Contributing Writer, Salon, June 6, 2011
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