From the pages of today's edition of the Boston Herald:
Insurers not covering new cancer treatments
Poor insurance coverage is causing cancer patients to miss out on cutting-edge technologies that use gene analysis to determine the best treatments — a fact a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration is calling another example of Obamacare’s failure to provide Americans with high-quality health care.
“There’s a degree of dishonesty about what the Affordable Care Act provides, and that is starkly clear when a patient has a serious type of cancer,” said former FDA Associate Commissioner Peter J. Pitts, who now serves as president of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest. “The soundbite of the ACA is, many more Americans now have health insurance. But the health insurance isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.”
Pitts said companies are covering the old-fashioned, less-effective chemotherapy regimens rather than more sophisticated approaches and prescription benefit managers are opting not to reimburse the more innovative, expensive treatments. Instead, they are negotiating rebates with pharmaceutical companies that they pocket, rather than passing the savings along to the patient.
“It’s time for insurance companies and prescription benefit managers to step up and do the right thing by putting patients first,” Pitts said. “When they choose not to reimburse for a product because it doesn’t earn them enough money, even though it could save a patient’s life, I think it’s despicable.”
And coverage for the treatments tends to vary by tens of thousands of dollars nationwide, depending on the company and geographic region, according to a University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center study published Monday in the journal Cancer.
The study found that insurance costs varied by as much as $47,000 for women on a chemotherapy plan that included the drug Herceptin, which is used to treat breast and stomach cancers by keeping cell growth at bay — and out-of-pocket costs range from $2,700 to $3,400.
The extra costs caused by these variations leads to an additional $1 billion spent to treat breast cancer in the U.S. each year, the study found. But cancer patients will often be covered for a treatment if it has been proven effective by the FDA, according to Dr. Harold Burstein, a breast cancer specialist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, who said: “The business of cures not being covered is extraordinarily uncommon.”
Many of the additional costs for the patient, he said, come in the form of lost income and child care.
“Those things are harder to measure than direct hospital bills,” he said, “and they generally have more of an impact.”
Insurers not covering new cancer treatments
Poor insurance coverage is causing cancer patients to miss out on cutting-edge technologies that use gene analysis to determine the best treatments — a fact a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration is calling another example of Obamacare’s failure to provide Americans with high-quality health care.
“There’s a degree of dishonesty about what the Affordable Care Act provides, and that is starkly clear when a patient has a serious type of cancer,” said former FDA Associate Commissioner Peter J. Pitts, who now serves as president of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest. “The soundbite of the ACA is, many more Americans now have health insurance. But the health insurance isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.”
Pitts said companies are covering the old-fashioned, less-effective chemotherapy regimens rather than more sophisticated approaches and prescription benefit managers are opting not to reimburse the more innovative, expensive treatments. Instead, they are negotiating rebates with pharmaceutical companies that they pocket, rather than passing the savings along to the patient.
“It’s time for insurance companies and prescription benefit managers to step up and do the right thing by putting patients first,” Pitts said. “When they choose not to reimburse for a product because it doesn’t earn them enough money, even though it could save a patient’s life, I think it’s despicable.”
And coverage for the treatments tends to vary by tens of thousands of dollars nationwide, depending on the company and geographic region, according to a University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center study published Monday in the journal Cancer.
The study found that insurance costs varied by as much as $47,000 for women on a chemotherapy plan that included the drug Herceptin, which is used to treat breast and stomach cancers by keeping cell growth at bay — and out-of-pocket costs range from $2,700 to $3,400.
The extra costs caused by these variations leads to an additional $1 billion spent to treat breast cancer in the U.S. each year, the study found. But cancer patients will often be covered for a treatment if it has been proven effective by the FDA, according to Dr. Harold Burstein, a breast cancer specialist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, who said: “The business of cures not being covered is extraordinarily uncommon.”
Many of the additional costs for the patient, he said, come in the form of lost income and child care.
“Those things are harder to measure than direct hospital bills,” he said, “and they generally have more of an impact.”
