For reasons no one has yet explained, a provision in the new health care reform law removes a previously Congressionally-mandated discount to children’s hospitals for drugs used to treat so-called “orphan diseases,” illnesses that are not common enough for the drugs to be profitable. Pharmaceutical companies have begun notifying the hospitals that they no longer qualify for the discounts, and the change will cost hundreds of millions of dollars, as well as put sick kids at risk. Continue reading
orphan diseases
Ethics and the $1000 a Day Drug
Yesterday, The New York Times informed us that a small drug company called Allos is charging $30,000 a month for a cancer drug, Folotyn, that treats a rare and usually fatal form of cancer that strikes fewer that 6,000 American a year. It doesn’t cure the cancer, but merely slows it down; even with that, victims seldom survive more than a few months. “This drug is not a home run. It’s not even a double. It’s a single,” the Times quotes Dr. Brad S. Kahl, a lymphoma specialist at the University of Wisconsin, as saying. Continue reading
Ethics Alarms 