Can Bacteria Treat Cancer, and Other Links
Can bacteria treat cancer? It is cheap, easy to produce and noninvasive.
71% of Republican voters want health care law repealed. Only 16 percent of Democratic voters do.
Secret rebates encourage doctors to prescribe a drug costing 100 times more than an identical drug. $2,000 versus $20.
UK’s NICE loses its rationing powers. About 20,000 patients die unnecessarily early each year because of NICE decisions.
Glad to see NICE is being reined in. 20,000 deaths? That’s an abomination.
On Republicans and Deomocrats, elections matter. What else is there to say?
Secret rebates? Isn’t that illegal?
NICE is coming to a health plan near you. And it won’t be very nice.
The rebate was to encourage the use of an expensive “on-label” drug treatment rather than a cheap “off-label” drug treatment. The on-label drug is way more expensive as sombody has to pay for that FDA approval.
The article says that there will be a government sponsored RCT trial of the two drugs shortly.
In the meantime, I’m confused. Don’t government programs like Medicaid take a dim view of off-label drug use? Wasn’t the Avastin contraversy solely about off-label use in breast cancer?
According to a New York Times editorial last year the fact that medicare adopted rules to expand coverage for “off-label” uses of cancer drugs was A Bad Thing. It said that “the danger in expanding usage without strong evidence of safety and effecitveness is that patients may be harmed.”
Who knew that a side effect of the politicization of health care would be the massive headache induced by having to keep up with what one is supposed to think.
NICE used a $34,000 cost per life year saved to determine whether to cover costly cancer drugs. This framework is being replaced by “value-based pricing” where bureaucrats consider the effectiveness and compare the cost of alternative drugs and dictate the price they are willing to pay. It’s hardly a change from the way it’s done by NICE.