Jane Hamsher: House Health Care Bill: A Death Sentence For My Fellow Breast Cancer Survivors

[seafan]

This is absolutely heartbreaking. We have, honest-to-God, been sold out.




I'm Jane, and I'm a breast cancer survivor



Jane writes:


October 29, 2009

There was much celebration on Capitol Hill today with the announcement of the new House health care bill. For myself, as a three time breast cancer survivor, there was tremendous sadness and disappointment in the Speaker.

Nancy Pelosi made a choice with regard to the lifesaving biologic drugs I took when I was in chemotherapy that will cost many of my fellow breast cancer survivors everything they own, and quite possibly their lives.

Jane goes on to describe the specific plights of a breast cancer survivor, a rheumatoid arthritis patient and a Crohn’s patient, who are required to pay exorbitant amounts for their biologic drugs to treat their conditions, at times reaching into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.



Jane continues:

But thanks to Representatives Anna Eshoo and Joe Barton, there will be no generic versions of these drugs. At least not for 12 years, if the House health care bill announced today passes. And because of an “evergreening” clause that grants drug companies a continued monopoly if they make slight changes to the drug (like creating a once-a-day dose where the original product was three times per day), they will never become generics. Instead of the Waxman-Deal amendment that granted much more reasonable terms to biologic patent holders, Speaker Pelosi chose the Eshoo-Barton amendment. And we could all be paying for that choice for the rest of our lives.

Breast cancer boards are filled with women who have been turned down by their insurance companies for Herceptin because they only cover generic drugs, or because they only pay a portion of the $48,000 a year (or more) that the drug costs.

.....

This is deeply, deeply wrong. It’s immoral for Congress to give endless monopolies to pharmaceutical companies on these cutting edge drugs in this bill. If an AIDS vaccine is found, it too will be a biologic.

These drug manufacturers argue that the cost of developing biologics is so expensive that they need the extra patent time to recoup their investment, or they won’t have any incentive to develop them. Hogwash. A study done by Drs. Joe DiMasi and Hank Grabowski, who are funded by PhRMA, concluded that the cost for developing biologics is $1.3 billion, as opposed to $1.2 billion for conventional drugs.

And as for incentive for development? As bleicher of Blue Mass Group notes, granting endless monopolies for slight changes encourages companies NOT to innovate:

(T)]hey will have far less reason or incentive to invest in patentable new cures, and will have every reason to invest in low risk, incremental development of existing products to reap (without taking risk) the same profitable rewards. In the short term, some of our local companies may like this protection of their products, but over the long term, as we fail to incent investment in new discovery research, our biotechnology edge will decline and the rest of the world will pass us by as they invent the next generation of products.

There is nothing good about this legislation, unless you’re Roche, Eli Lilly, Schering-Plough or any of the other giant pharmaceutical companies reaping huge profits off these blockbuster drugs of the future. About a quarter of new drugs, and half of important new drugs are biologics. This is nothing short of an attempt to sew up the future at the expense of you and your children.

So POP is joining to together with students like Laura Musselwhite and others in the AMSA for a Halloween “treat, not trick” demonstration this Friday at four locations around the country. I’ll be there with medical students in Washington DC at the Russell Senate office building as they arrive fully costumed in their white coats and give out “treats,” urging Senators not to “trick” the nation’s patients with a bad ‘biologic’ medicines proposal.

Please join us:

DATE: FRIDAY, OCT. 30

Washington, DC: Russell Senate Office Bldg, Constitution & Delaware at 3:00 pm

Baltimore, MD: Barbara Mikulski’s office, 1629 Thames St. at 2:30 pm

Raleigh, NC: Senator Kay Hagan’s office, 310 New Bern Ave @ 1:30 pm

Palo Alto, CA: Anna Eshoo’s office, 698 Emerson St, Palo Alto at 2:00 pm

These students are fighting for us, fighting for our future. Please join me in supporting them, and their commitment to being healers who want to give their patients the very best care that they can. They don’t want their hands tied by this bill. I have been helping them organize and they are just so wonderful.

Even if you’re not in close to one of the events, you can help out by joining the POP Facebook Group, Tweeting about the events and donating to POP.

And please call your member of Congress and tell them that this is a terrible bill that will sentence breast cancer survivors and others to financial ruin and death. For the sake of everyone in need of health care in the future, please tell them to vote “no” on this cruel piece of legislation crafted to maximize drug company profits at the cost of human lives.

Related thread:

Jane Hamsher: Are You Or Someone You Know Paying $50,000 A Year For Drugs?