New medicines—who can afford them?

A $100,000 price tag for one drug? Unbelievable. Yet it’s true. That’s what Avastin’s manufacturer, Genentech, plans to charge for one year’s supply to treat one person with breast or lung cancer. Its current price for advanced colon cancer treatment is an astounding $50,000 a year. If taken for 11 months, it can prolong life for about five months, combined with chemotherapies.

How can they do this? Easily. Because they can. This company is charging the highest amount it can get away with. The underlying reason is production of medications for profit. In this brutal “free market” system of health care, drug companies can charge exorbitant prices no matter how many thousands of people need the medication and even if it’s a life saver.

Instead of holding in check this unbridled greed, the Bush administration is wholly cooperating with the drug companies and is finding every way possible to help them maximize profits.

Even for those with health insurance, an individual’s co-payments for Avastin could be up to $20,000 per year—half or more of many people’s yearly income. Many cancer patients are telling their doctors they can’t afford it, and right now insurance companies won’t cover it for breast and lung cancer so patients are being held responsible for its costs.

But Genentech officials see no need to decrease prices and have the nerve to suggest that people who cannot afford Avastin use cheaper drugs. However, these medications have not been as effective. (New York Times, Feb. 21)

Avastin now brings in $1 billion a year for Genentech, a biotechnology company mainly owned by Roche. The pharmaceutical giant is expected to garner $7 billion in Avastin sales by 2009 in the U.S. alone, while the company’s overall profits are predicted to hit $4 billion by then.

A closer look at pharmaceutical corporations’ arguments on pricing proves them to be bogus. They claim that costs of new drugs are very high due to research and development expenses. But the reality is that they spend double that on sales and marketing. (Center for Public Integrity)

Further, manufacturing Avastin costs a small fraction of the amount Genentech is charging for it. Since it already exists, any research and development costs should be minuscule, if anything. Many health care professionals thought its cost would increase only slightly for use in breast and lung cancer treatment, since production costs are low. However, Genentech has doubled the already outrageous price.

Yet working people, most of whom can’t afford this drug, helped to pay for its production. The federal government funds the National Institutes of Health from the people’s taxes. That agency has awarded 11 grants concerning Avastin since 2002, some for clinical trials. Its manufacturers got government funding for “extensive” research.

The sickest people—including those in terminal stages of illnesses—are being held hostage by the pharmaceutical and insurance industries and being given a terrible choice: either pay or go without treatment. These drug corporations are callously betting that desperately sick people will find a way to pay their shocking prices. Only the wealthy will be able to afford these medicines so that Genentech and their ilk can reap mega-profits.

Why can’t everyone who needs medications get them for free or at a very low cost?

The pharmaceutical price-gouging shows at the minimum the need for government regulation, price controls and deeply discounted prescription drug costs, including for people on Medicare. Going further, it shows the need for a national health plan where the government pays for all health care, including medications, for all who need it.

But it also calls into question the very nature of capitalism and its built-in contradictions, which prevent it from making health care available to the majority of the people, no matter how high-tech or how wealthy the system becomes. As long as health care is based on the profit motive, it simply cannot meet most people’s needs.

It shows that the time to struggle for socialized medicine has come. This would guarantee that health care, including medications, is provided for everyone in need. It shows how necessary a socialist system is, where people’s lives come first and where society’s goals are to provide for human needs, not to increase profits.