It was a good article until the very end. I don't follow your logic at all. Apparently you feel we have to give up development of new therapies as a result of health care reform, which is ridiculous.
One thing about the rich, there are relatively few of them. That means it will take years to develop the statistics necessary to prove a treatment. Some rarer diseases may never have enough trials.
And you can't prove a treatment is cost-effective until it starts to see widespread use. If, for example, we based electric car viability on the current price of lithium ion batteries versus the current cost of gasoline engines, then electric cars would never become available. Does anybody expect lithium ion batteries to become cheaper because of all the Teslas being sold? So according to your logic, we better give up on replacing the gas car. After all, it's cost-effective and works very well.
You may be a big proponent of Obamacare. Fine. But to meekly accept that it also means a radical slowing down of new treatments (already a glacial process by its very nature) just doesn't make sense. Over the coming decades, the way to make health care truly cheap and routine is through greater research and development. All the cost savings in Obamacare are just bandages that will eventually succumb to inflation and greatly increased demand.
You talk about "bankrupting the many in the name of curing a few". And yet it has been the few (mostly the US) that have provided the treatments that saved the many all over the world. By killing new R&D in the US health care reform threatens the future health of the rest of the world. Maybe instead of giving up we should be looking for ways to encourage R&D. It seems to me this is what any compassionate person would do instead of giving up.
There may be a big breakthrough in cancer therapy coming.
A study published in Nature, from a team headed by CalTech chemical engineering professor Mark Davis (right), proves a method for RNA Interference, using tiny bits of RNA injected into the blood, which interfered with the reproduction of tumor cells.
There is tremendous excitement over “game-changing” therapies for cancer, Parkinson’s, and chronic pain.
As always there is also a compelling back story.
Davis began his work after watching his wife nearly die from breast cancer treatments. The work he has just done on humans replicates research that won Andrew Fire and Craig Mello the 2006 Nobel Prize for Medicine.
The work was done by a CalTech corporate spin-off, Calando Pharmaceuticals, owned by Arrowhead Research, and shares in Arrowhead jumped on the news.
But the path from discovery to market gets longer under health reform.
As The Scientist notes, the study did not prove the therapy was controlling the cancer. Killing some cancer cells with a novel treatment does not effect a cure. You have to get them all.
Not only that but in most countries, and the U.S. under health reform will gradually become like most countries, you will not only have to prove a therapy works, but that it’s cost-effective compared to other treatments., before it goes into general use.
This is a big hurdle many drugs and devices find hard to jump in Europe. It’s why the U.S. is the leader in developing new therapies.
Failing to prove comparative effectiveness, new treatments can be used only on patients willing to pay cash. There will be sick rich people looking to this therapy when it’s ready, in about five years. But don’t expect insurance or Medicare to cover it until it proves it’s cost effective.
Experiments are great, and sometimes being a guinea pig pays off. But new treatments will go first to those who can afford the expense and risk of failure, only later to the rest of us.
That’s just the way it has to be. The days of bankrupting the many in the name of curing a few are over.
