WASHINGTON, D.C. & NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Advocacy organization Patients Rising and research organization Center for Medicine in the Public Interest (CMPI), today called for a halt to misleading claims about “unsustainable drug pricing,” and instead said it’s time to work on improving access to life changing treatments, not denying essential care based on false economics.
The organizations are responding to an announcement from the self-named Campaign for Sustainable Rx Pricing, to unveil “market-based policy solutions to curb rising drug prices.”
Jonathan Wilcox, policy director for Patients Rising said, “While cost-effectiveness of different treatments is one parameter, it is not the only issue when it comes to giving patients the treatments they deserve. We need to deliver medical care based on fact-based information, not half-truths and misdirection.”
CMPI’s Robert Goldberg, Ph.D. added, “As a healthcare economist I can say with certainty that many cancer medicines actually reduce the cost of healthcare by keeping people out of the hospital and generally healthier. Efforts such as cost-controls will just slow the progress that is being made in treating and sometimes even curing chronic and deadly diseases.”
The organizations say:
- We need to streamline the research and development process to help reduce the tremendous costs involved with bringing a new, innovative therapeutic to market.
- We need to modernize the regulatory system to avoid lengthy, redundant and expensive clinical trials that often just delay access to new therapies.
- We need to untangle the maze of insurance practices that add hundreds of billions of dollars to the cost of health care, burden doctors and are barriers to patient access to the right treatment at the right time. Some of these insurance practices are actually illegal.
“We need our doctors to wear white coats, not accountants’ green eyeshades,” says Robert Tufts, multiple myeloma patient and former Major League Baseball pitcher who is now a college professor in New York. “As patients we pay the insurance premiums, taxes and medical co-pays. We want to have a say in our medical care, not merely be told that we are a financial burden to society.”
CMPI and Patients Rising call on patients, policy makers and payors to work together to bring patients the best that medical innovation has to offer.
