At 50, Medicare and Medicaid Face the Challenge of a New Generation of Super-Expensive Drugs

By STEVEN FINDLAY Happy birthday Medicare and Medicaid!   Fifty years old today.   Middle age.  Congratulations.  You’ve survived a lot—and 76 million baby boomers and 60 million low-income Americans are mighty glad you’re still around, covering one in three Americans, with solvency until 2030 at last accounting. Unfortunately, the challenges are not going to let up.  In fact, they’re likely to get worse.  Those challenges are discussed at length in several places that celebrate this milestone—most notably here, here, here,  in the current issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association   (subscription required for access to full articles); and in an Oxford Press book of 16 essays. This piece focuses on one of the biggest challenges facing both programs: the increasing number of very expensive specialty drugs. These are medicines made primary through bioengineering.  They are often referred to as biologics.  THCB readers will no doubt have heard of the hepatitis C drug Sovaldi, the current poster child of expensive drugs at $84,000 for a 12-week course of treatment.  More generally, specialty drug prices range from $2,000 to $10,000 a month.  One source pegs the average price at around $36,000 a year. When there were just a few biologics, it was not a big problem.  But now there are a couple dozen.  Some treat rare diseases that afflict a small number of people, but an increasing number target cancer, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthri...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: THCB Steven Findlay Source Type: blogs