November 17th, 2010 by Lucy Hornstein, M.D. in Better Health Network, Health Policy, News, Opinion
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There’s an article in the New England Journal of Medicine entitled the “Unintended Consequences of Four-Dollar Generic Drugs.“ Ever one to hone in on unintended consequences of all stripes, I quickly clicked through. Oh, dear! What bad could possibly come of making drugs significantly more affordable?
Were more people demanding prescriptions for drugs they didn’t really need now that they were so cheap? (Dream on. I’m still twisting arms to get my high-risk cardiac patients to take their generic statins.) Were pharmacies going out of business, no longer to make ends meet without massive markups on brand name drugs, contributing to skyrocketing unemployment and otherwise adding to the country’s general economic malaise? Were cardiologists’ incomes plummeting because of sagging rates of coronary disease now that everyone could easily afford their beta blockers, ACE inhibitors, and statins?
Or maybe it was something good. I guess, technically, “unintended” doesn’t automatically equal “bad.” What could it be? So I read. And what did I discover? Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at Musings of a Dinosaur*
October 25th, 2010 by Debra Gordon in Better Health Network, Health Policy, Opinion, Research
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I spent last week in Gothenburg, Sweden covering the European Committee for the Treatment of Multiple Sclerosis (ECTRIMS) meeting. Lots of good science, lots of excitement over the new oral and targeted therapies coming on the market to treat this awful disease. But what I want to write about isn’t the science, but about how it will play out in the brave new world of healthcare in which we all live in today.
For instance, consider the first oral therapy to hit the market: Gilenya (fingolimod), which the FDA approved in September. Last month Novartis announced the price: $48,000 a year.
This is not a rant against the high cost of drugs, however. It is a rant against the inability of our healthcare system to take the long view of the impact of such drugs, a view that is particularly important with a chronic disease like MS that strikes healthy young adults in their early 20s and 30s. Read more »
*This blog post was originally published at A Medical Writer's Musings on Medicine, Health Care, and the Writing Life*
