'60 Minutes' Just Attacked High Drug Prices

'60 Minutes' Just Attacked High Drug Prices. Here's What You Should Know.



www.cbsnews.com/videos/the-cost-of-cancer-drugs


60 Minutes, the most successful news program in American history, just took aim at the extraordinarily high ($100,000 per patient per year) prices charged for cancer drugs. The pharmaceutical industry, which only provided canned statements and badly thought-out explanation via the president of its lobbying group, came off looking callous and insensitive.

Here’s what 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl had, none of it new: first she chronicled how two doctors at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Peter Bach and Leonard Saltz, decided that the hospital would not pay for an Sanofi's Zaltrap, which cost $11,063 a month, for colon cancer, because it was more expensive than Roche’s Avastin but no better. Then she spoke to Hagop Kantarjian, of M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, who co-authored an editorial in the hematology journal Blood, decrying the high prices of drugs like Gleevec, from Novartis and Sprycel from Bristol-Myers Squibb BMY +1.27% for rare blood cancers. A complete transcript of the segment, as well as the video itself, can be found here.

There are a couple zingers from the episode that are likely to enter our national conversation about high drug prices. Stahl asked Saltz if we have to start treating the cost of medicines like a side effect. He responded: “I think that’s a fair way of looking at it. We’re starting to see the term ‘financial toxicity’ being used in the literature. Individual patients are going into bankruptcy trying to deal with these prices.” Saltz has been fighting high cancer drug prices since I met him a decade ago, but with that line he landed one of his strongest ever punches.  Then there is this from Kantarjian: “They are making prices unreasonable, unsustainable and, in my opinion, immoral.”

But the biggest point landed was not from a quote or a mind-blowing stat, but from an eyebrow raise. Bach tells Stahl: “Medicare has to pay exactly what the drug company charges. Whatever that number is.” And Stahl is shocked. “Wait a minute, this is a law?”


“Yes,” Bach replies.

“And there’s no negotiating whatsoever with Medicare?”

“No.”