The drop in this year’s supply of chemotherapy drugs have left cancer patients in frightening circumstances, as many have been unable to receive the treatment they need within the healthcare system.
Stephanie Scanlan, the manager of a busy state office in Tallahassee, Florida, became aware of the shortages in the Spring when two of the three drugs that usually treated her rare bone cancer were too scarce to acquire, and she had to go forward without them.
Ms. Scanlan, 56, searched for these drugs in various places for months, meanwhile, the cancer was spreading from her left wrist to her rib, then to her spine. By summer, she had few other choices than to amputate her left wrist to try to stop the spread.
“I’m scared to death”, Scanlan told the Times before her surgery. “This is America. Why are we having to choose who to save?”
The medications that Scanlan needs along with hundreds of other generic drugs, including amoxicillin to treat infections and fentanyl to ease pain during surgery, are currently still in short supply. Yet, there seems to be an absence of solutions on the horizon to improve the delivery of generic drugs which accumulate about 90% of prescriptions in the United States.
Dr. Robert Califf, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, has projected the changes that the organization could make to improve the state of the situation, but he claims that the root of the problem “is due to economic factors that we don’t control… They’re beyond the remit of the F.D.A..”
According to a statement made this month in a hearing by Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, who is also chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, “A substantial portion of these market failures are driven by the consolidation of generic drug purchasing among a small group of very powerful health care middlemen.”
As a result of this privatization of healthcare commodities, current and former executives within the generic drug industry are concerned with the risks of increasing production, as the prices of the drugs are now so low that making these medicines could result in their bankruptcy.
Though in some respects the price reductions could be beneficial in the hands of intermediary organizations that demand lower prices right after signing contracts with drug makers. The increasing downward pressure on drug prices has incited these group purchasers to compete against one another to offer hospitals the lowest prices, which could hopefully help consumers by increasing accessibility to medication.
Yet, some doctors and pharmacists argue that this model is not sustainable and will harm drug manufacturers and possibly consumers in the end, but there remain few other alternatives to this option.
