Opinion: The ‘cancer growing in cancer medicine’: pharma money paid to doctors
Americans are rightly furious about the high and unsustainable price of cancer drugs, which now routinely cost more than $100,000 per year of therapy. Those prices are made worse by the fact that most cancer drugs offer only modest benefits — one study put the median benefit at 2.1 extra months of life — along with the fact that expert physicians frequently recommend these drugs for off-label uses, meaning using a drug for a purpose it was not initially approved for.
The House of Representatives, the Senate, presidential candidates, and even the president have floated proposals to tackle drug prices. While all contain good ideas, none address one of the elephants in the room: the experts who tell doctors how to use these medications.
