Dealing with the spiralling price of medicines: issues and solutions

Abstract

Escalating cost of medicines is rapidly becoming a serious threat to patients and health systems. This trend has been documented to impact patient outcomes adversely. As clinicians and tax payers, it is our responsibility to be aware of the potential detrimental effects spiralling costs have on our patients, our community and our health system and to mitigate these effects by exposing this issue to our respective professional societies, representatives of the pharmaceutical companies that we interact with, government regulatory bodies and to patients who we are caring for. Only through understanding and constructive actions will we be able to provide the best quality of care to our patients and continue to enjoy universal healthcare in our country.

Comparative Effectiveness and Safety of Monoclonal Antibodies (Bevacizumab, Cetuximab, and Panitumumab) in Combination with Chemotherapy for Metastatic Colorectal Cancer: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

“…We believe the updated review will help people better understand the benefits and harms of the different treatments in heterogeneous populations in the ‘real world,’ reflecting conditions in routine clinical practice [50, 51]. This is important given the increasing costs of treatments for cancer, increasing pressure on available resources [26, 27, 34, 52–54], and the extent of current litigation surrounding these three MoAbs in Brazil.…”

Free Markets and Public Interests in the Pharmaceutical Industry: A Comparative Analysis of Catholic and Reformational Critiques of Neoliberal Thought

“…In this section, we analyze the practical implications of the neoliberal free market perspective of Hayek, CST, and RPH in a case study about serving the public interest in the pharmaceutical sector. Recently, the pharmaceutical industry has been negatively covered in the press and in academic publications, for example, regarding the outrageously expensive cost of so-called orphan drugs (drugs for rare diseases that affect small numbers of individuals) (Davies, Fulton, Brook, & Hughes, 2017; Ma, Danta, Day, & Ma, 2018; Prasad, De Jesus, & Mailankody, 2017). This development was encouraged by orphan drug legislation in the United States and Europe that aimed to make the development of such drugs profitable.…”

“…They found that between 1988 and 2009, pharmaceutical companies enjoyed substantially higher profit margins than other companies, while investing proportionately less in R&D than other high-R&D firms. Therefore it is suggested that high prices of medicines are primarily related, not to high R&D costs, but to the lack of market competition (Ma et al, 2018).…”

ImmunoPET in Multiple Myeloma—What? So What? Now What?

“…This last observation is, in fact, part of a wider debate on the actual form of innovation in cancer drugs and the setting up of most clinical trials. Currently, an explosive and unacceptable increase in costs accompanies the development and marketing of anti-cancer drugs [67][68][69]. Combined with unrepresentative results in very limited patient cohorts, insignificant clinical benefits, and more than occasionally, concomitant impairment of patients' quality of life, the actual clinical research paradigm seems to have outlasted its value in its current form [68,[70][71][72].…”