"I'm not nearly as afraid of dying as
I am of the hinges inside my mind and soul rusting closed. I am desperate to
keep them open, because I think that if they close, that's one's first death,
the loss of hope, curiosity and possibility, the spiritual death. After that,
it seems to me, the second one is just a formality. I want to oil the hinges,
force the doors to stay open." Author Jon Katz – Running to the Mountain
It’s Photo Friday! What a
beautiful weekend. I don’t have anything
to report on the cancer front.
Appointments with doctors start in September and go through the end of
the year. But for now I am enjoying this
brief appointment free time. I did come across a great article on NPR I thought
I’d share. Love you all, Happy Weekend!
A group of cancer
doctors is trying to create a database on cancer drugs. It would give a score
for each drug, reflecting how well the drug works. It would also list how much
the drug costs.
STEVE INSKEEP,
HOST:
Now we have the
story of information you get from your doctor as well as information you do
not.
DAVID GREENE,
HOST:
A good doctor is
a source of information. You can ask what might be causing a bump on your wrist
or whether you can take one medication with another one.
INSKEEP: Yet, the
doctor often will not know the answer to a really basic question, a question
you'd ask in almost any other transaction - how much is your treatment going to
cost? David Kestenbaum, of NPR's Planet Money team, reports on one effort to
change that.
DAVID KESTENBAUM,
BYLINE: Richard Schilsky is a cancer doctor, and cancer drugs can vary a lot in
cost. They can range from hundreds of dollars a month to thousands. But like a
lot of doctors, that was not something he paid a lot of attention to.
RICHARD SCHILSKY:
You know, where I worked in an academic medical center for just about 30 years,
I had no idea what the drugs cost. It wasn't my job to know, and frankly, the
information was not, you know, readily available.
KESTENBAUM:
Schilsky today is the chief medical officer of the American Society of Clinical
Oncology, which recently decided it would be good to have a kind of database of
cancer drugs. The database would include a score for each drug - basically how
well the drug worked - and also right next to it, how much the drug cost. About
a month ago, Schilsky's group published a paper laying out the idea, and at the
back of the paper, just as kind of an example, it laid out the numbers for a
few drugs. Some of those drugs did not come out looking so good. There was this
one lung cancer drug in particular made by Eli Lilly.
SCHILSKY: It's
called Pemetrexed, or the brand name is Alimta.
KESTENBAUM:
Alimta scored a zero, meaning it didn't work any better than the standard
treatment. And then there was the cost - 10 times more expensive than the
standard treatment.
SCHILSKY: Nine
thousand one hundred ninety-three dollars per month.
KESTENBAUM:
Bloomberg Business ran a story headlined "Drug Costing $9,200 Score Zero
On Cancer Doctor Value Scale." The article noted that the drug, Alimta,
was also Eli Lilly's best seller last year, and it brought in a revenue of $2.8
billion. Eli Lilly declined to make anyone available for this story, but
Schilsky says Eli Lilly called his team, questioning that score of zero and
pointing out that the drug is intended for patients with a particular kind of
lung cancer. Schilsky says that was a fair point, so his group put out an
additional score for the drug's effectiveness on that subgroup of patients.
SCHILSKY: The net
health benefit score was 16.
KESTENBAUM:
Better than zero, but it's out of a total possible score of 130.
SCHILSKY: So 16
is certainly at the low end of that range.
KESTENBAUM: On
average, it allows patients to live an extra six weeks compared to the cheaper
treatment. Is it worth it? That is normally a question pondered by insurance
companies. Schilsky says maybe the rest of us should be thinking about it also.
SCHILSKY: This is
one of the real difficulties with the U.S. health care system is that the cost
of almost any kind of treatment are largely invisible to either the providers of
that treatment or the patients who are receiving that treatment.
KESTENBAUM: What
should a patient do when there is one drug that is a little better but costs a
lot more? That is a hard decision, but he says one worth having. David
Kestenbaum, NPR News.
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