Excerpts from article: “According to the petition, the problem is so egregious that Roche’s head of pricing, Jennifer Cozzone, apparently said that the price of the drug reflects the value to patients. How wonderful. They’re putting a price tag on someone’s life; except it’s telling them that’s the price they’ll have to pay if they want to go on living for awhile. So, if a patient in the U.K. really wants their life expectancy extended, they’ll find a way to cough up the price of a small house, even if it means sacrificing the rest of their livelihood. Kadcyla has also been approved for use here in the U.S. It’s manufactured and distributed by Roch-owned Genentech, with a price tag of $94,000 per patient per year, according to a 2013 article inForbes. The income of the average U.S. family is less than half of that. That’s less than the U.K. price tag, though. How generous of Genentech to do that. In the U.K., the drug is actually so expensive that’s it out of the U.K.’s National Health Service’s (NHS) reach. So any U.K. patients who want this drug, who don’t have private insurance that will cover it, will have to pay for it entirely out of pocket. According to The Independent, pricing it affordably enough for the NHS would reach roughly 1,500 women. That’s hardly an insignificant number. Here, we appear to have something that the U.K. doesn’t. Forbes mentioned that Genentech runs a program aimed at people who can’t afford the cost-of-a-small-house price tag. For those that qualify, Genenetech will provide Kadcyla at a substantially reduced cost, or even free of charge. There’s a good chance that there are people out there who are too wealthy to qualify for that program, and too poor to afford the drug. It’s hard to determine whether insurance covers Kadcyla in such a way that it would be affordable to the average patient.” Read full article:
Posted on: Sun, 12 Oct 2014 15:06:20 +0000
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