In his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Emperor of All Maladies, oncologist-author Siddhartha Mukherjee calls cancer the “defining plague of our generation”. A rather morbid description of a disease that until recently trailed infectious diseases, particularly in India, in garnering public policy attention, but is now inching up on the government’s agenda.
The government revised its list of essential medicines after eight years, and the new list includes drugs for treating cancer. Once the New List of Essential Medicines (NLEM) is notified, the Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilisers will push for imposing price control on all the drugs on the list. This could have been triggered by the Supreme Court’s directive to the government to do so. Right now, the government controls the price of only 74 of the 354 drugs on the list.(This story appears in the 17 June, 2011 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)
I think cancer drugs in the list are old drugs, many of which are already reasonably priced. Can govt do something about the effective new drugs, which don't compromise the quality of life and prolong a patients life by a good number of years? A dose of breast cancer drug herceptin costs over a lakh and one needs 18 such doses. Sure this drug is not effective in all cases, one needs genetic testing to take this but still, imagine a middle class family shelling out Rs 20 lakhs for one round of treatment. Cancer by itself kills people, its cost of treatment kills the family as well.
on Jun 11, 2011