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China Negotiating For Cheaper Cancer Drugs (reuters.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the supply-and-demand dept.

hackingbear writes: "China's medical insurance regulator will begin negotiations with domestic and overseas pharmaceutical companies to lower prices of cancer drugs in a bid to cut the financial burden on patients," reports Reuters. "The State Medical Insurance Administration said it was preparing to include more cancer drugs on its list of medicines eligible for reimbursement, and said 10 foreign and eight domestic pharmaceutical companies had expressed a willingness to work with the authority."

Unlike India, or what we may have been told, China enforces pharmaceutical patents rigorously. Recently, the Chinese box office hit Dying to Survive, which told the real life story of a leukemia patient/businessman put on trial due to smuggling imitation drugs to help fellow patients who cannot pay the exorbitant cost of a drug produced by a Swiss pharmaceutical giant, has brought in huge revenues and rave reviews since the movie was released on July 5. Last year, China forced two rounds of NRDL negotiations after seven years of stasis. More than a dozen cancer drugs, including AstraZeneca's Iressa and Roche's Herceptin, are now covered by the country's insurance program, but only after the companies agreed to huge discounts -- a typical move trading lower prices for higher volume. Demand for Herceptin, for example, surged after the discount and triggered a national shortage.

16 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. Australia by quarrel · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is how Australia does it.

    The PBS - Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme - provides heavily subsidised prescription meds to any with a script from a Doctor (and super cheap for certain categories like Age Pensioners, disabled etc).

    The catch is, pharmaceutical companies have to try and get their drugs on the PBS, and to do that they have to offer up evidence that their drug is better than those currently on the PBS, and quantify the extra benefit. For some drugs (like psychiatric meds), just show ANY benefit over placebo is a huge hurdle. Then quantifying the benefit to tax payers to justify what gets paid per pill.

    Sometimes it limits the quick adoption of new drugs (although there are other paths for experimental treatments), but the main thing it provides is a science based monopoly buyer. The drug companies don't get to artificially court demand, and extract super high margins without showing they're worth it.

    Oh, and it is illegal to advertise prescription meds in Australia. None of these ads full of older gents "Talk to your Doctor today about Cialis."

    The system is very effective.

    1. Re: Australia by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Same in the UK. This is how national health services are supposed to work. Leave it to corporations and consumer choice? You get the USA's hyper-exploitative system where patients are stuffed full of questionable drugs, many of which they probably don't even need.

  2. Look, I get it by pablo_max · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I understand that finding, testing and indeed certifying new drugs is costly. I have worked in the certification world for 15 years.
    I also understand that a company needs to make a profit.
    Having said that, a drug company is not the same as a company like Apple or Samsung or Volkswagen.
    You can live without your iphone, so if you cannot afford the 1k price of an iphone..well...don't buy it.

    Can you do the same with that Hep-C cure? With AIDS drugs? No, you need them to survive. You will literally die if you do not get them. So, as we have seen many, many times over the years, old drug patents are purchased by third parties and the price is increased by, often times, more than 1000%.
    Or a super computer has slightly varied and already existing drug and a slight improvement is seen for MS patients. So, these are sold for $3000 per treatment.
    This is literally holding the public hostage.
    Sure, the assholes may argue... you can choose not to take it. Let us see your opinion when your little girls gets cancer (god forbid it) and you choose not to pay the 25000$ treatment because it's not fully covered by the insurance.

    In my opinion, it is fucking disgusting that this is allowed to happen. Utterly fucking disgusting. I would argue that anyone who thinks it is reasonable that drug companies should be able to charge whatever they like for literally life saving drugs, then you sir, are a complete and total sack of shit and the reason why we cannot have nice things. So, go fuck yourself.

    1. Re:Look, I get it by CrimsonAvenger · · Score: 2, Insightful

      And the counterpoint...

      So, how do you convince a drug company to spend the (sometimes) billions to develop a new drug if they're never going to sell enough of it to recover the billions?

      I suppose you can have the government do all drug development/testing. But that just means raising taxes to pay for the development of new drugs.

      Which means the drugs will STILL cost as much as the old way, but you won't see the costs on your doctor bill, you'll see them hidden on your tax bill....

      --

      "I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
    2. Re:Look, I get it by geekmux · · Score: 2

      And the counterpoint...

      So, how do you convince a drug company to spend the (sometimes) billions to develop a new drug if they're never going to sell enough of it to recover the billions?

      Well, I would first require a detailed audit of that billion-dollar price tag. After getting rid of 70% of the wasted overhead, the cost would likely drop considerably. Or you would pressure companies into reducing the cost by 70%, as I would imagine they would do anything to avoid an audit that would reveal how much excess there is in that R&D price tag.

    3. Re:Look, I get it by paiute · · Score: 2

      After getting rid of 70% of the wasted overhead, the cost would likely drop considerably.

      Please explain where this magic 70% is being wasted in R&D.

      --
      If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
  3. Single payer by 110010001000 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    One of the advantages of a single payer system is bulk discounts. Congratulations to China!

  4. They ARENT spending much on research! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    That is a blatant lie.
    Look at their numbers. Nearly all is marketing, lobbyism and sales.

    Pretty much all drugs come from them taking some thing they found in nature (e.g. my blood medication, wich is one of the most popular in the world, literally came from a snake poison suggested by a shaman),
    and then cluelessly tinkering with it, to see what the modified variants will do.
    A researcher for a big pharma company admitted that they really have no idea what they are doing, in an AMA in Reddit, a few years ago. (And when they fail, you get stuff like meth and krokodil popping up on the black market. Or it gets sold under its biggest side-effect.)

    Mind you, I'm fine with them doing that. It's useful.

    What I am not fine with, is them claiming it is soo hard, and soo valuable.
    Let alone it having to be for-profit (aka taking more money than they actuall worked for in return) or private.

    Let us, together (aka an actual government, not the US corporate oligarchy sock puppet scapegoat), give out great research grants, based on acrual potential usefulness for society! And when it results in something, allow everyone to manufacture it.
    Because the researchera were already paid for their work, and are not entitled to some magic exclusivity for manufaturing it, on top of that money, since they did not work on top of that alread paid researh work either.

    1. Re:They ARENT spending much on research! by paiute · · Score: 2

      Look at their numbers. Nearly all is marketing, lobbyism and sales.

      Nope. A lot of a pharma's budget is that, but unless you market, you don't sell. If you don't sell, you don't fund R&D. It's a balance.

      Pretty much all drugs come from them taking some thing they found in nature (e.g. my blood medication, wich is one of the most popular in the world, literally came from a snake poison suggested by a shaman), and then cluelessly tinkering with it, to see what the modified variants will do.

      Nope. Some drugs come from modification of natural products. Some are new structures. They tinker, but the chemists are not clueless. .

      A researcher for a big pharma company admitted that they really have no idea what they are doing

      Nope. Researchers have an idea of what they are doing. It just turns out that human biochemistry is really really complex. .

      What I am not fine with, is them claiming it is soo hard, and soo valuable..

      But it is hard. And modern pharmaceuticals are valuable. Stop taking them if you want.

      --
      If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
    2. Re:They ARENT spending much on research! by dave420 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You don't need to market drugs if you're planning on selling to national health services. You bring your drugs to them, show them how good they are, and if they're better than the current drugs, they'll be bought in bulk, covering your costs. You only need to market drugs which don't sell themselves, or if you're marketing to people who don't care about efficacy (like to end-patients on TV in the US and NZ), or buying off doctors (US).

    3. Re:They ARENT spending much on research! by registrations_suck · · Score: 2

      Pretty much all drugs come from them taking some thing they found in nature (e.g. my blood medication, wich is one of the most popular in the world, literally came from a snake poison suggested by a shaman), and then cluelessly tinkering with it, to see what the modified variants will do.

      If that's all it takes, then how come YOU are not doing the same thing and making billions?

  5. cost in America will go up to cover this by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 2

    cost in America will go up to cover this.

    But you can order from Canadian places for a lot less.

  6. Re:Look, I get it-rent-seeking. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yes. The US performs 42% of the world's drug research. If we put price controls in, all of the governments around the world would have to raise prices or remove drugs from their benefits plan. While the article below ignores the claim of "free riding" by other government, it later proves that without using that particular phrase.

    http://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/369727-us-drug-prices-higher-than-in-the-rest-of-the-world-heres-why

  7. Re:cost in America will go up to cover this by wbr1 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    In the US - the gvmnt cannot negotiate the price of drugs - even for medicare/medicaid. Given that these programs are one of the biggest purchasers of drugs in the USA - this is a golden teat that pharmaceutical companies will continue to exploit - by raising prices all around. Why not, their biggest customer is guaranteed to pay any price.

    --
    Silence is a state of mime.
  8. You can't order from Canada by rsilvergun · · Score: 2

    they go out of their way to block Canada to US sales for just that reason. A lot of folks I know go down to Mexico. If they've got family that knows how to navigate their healthcare system is works well. That works for Canada to a certain extent. Canada has "Healthcare refugees" who move to Canada with their spouses because otherwise they can't get care. There several videos on youtube about it.

    I've got friends and family who have long term illnesses in America and have spent their entire lives struggling to get the care they need to live. But at least 20% of Americans are convinced that taxes will go up if we switch to single payer (even adjusting for the cost of healthcare from their employer). A lot of these are ex-military and people on Medicare who "got theirs, fark me" too, which doesn't help.

    I think the hodgepodge is about to collapse though. The Republican party is currently gutting the VA (Trump's Admin just closed a whole bunch of sites and did general funding cuts). They've been chipping away at Medicare too (they did the Plan-B stuff under Bush and Paul Ryan & Co have been conditioning the electorate to believe we can't afford it). Meanwhile Trump's Admin has allowed a challenge to the ACA's pre-existing coverage requirement to go forward unchallenged. It will probably make it up to the SCOTUS where the newly minted judges appointed by Trump will kill it. That means we'll be back to the days when you can't change jobs without permanently losing access to health care.

    If the Dems take the house this might be slowed for a few years, but eventually the legal challenges will make it to the Superme Court where they right wing judges will shut it down. Eventually they'll challenge Medicare and that'll be that. At that point our only option will be no healthcare for anyone but the very wealthy.

    The question is, what then? Will we slide into a third world winner take all economy? That seems to be where we're heading. I'm expecting to be dead (I'm 40 and men in my family are not long lived no matter what) and my kid will hopefully have a STEM degree and will move to Canada but otherwise we're going to need a constitutional amendment to fix this mess.

    --
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  9. Re:cost in America will go up to cover this by sjames · · Score: 3

    Let's be more clear. The government CHOOSES not to. There is nothing that fundamentally stops it, just a bit of legislation that could be reversed quickly if the legislature ever decided to put the general welfare ahead of infinite profits for the few.