An Easy (But Politically Complicated) Way To Save Billions Of Dollars On Medical Care


Photo credit: KAREN BLEIER/AFP/Getty Images
Photo credit: KAREN BLEIER/AFP/Getty Images

I sometimes worry that my wife Paula won’t be able to see me grow old. Not that I expect to outlive her. She is four years my junior and has the blood pressure of a 17-year-old track star. It’s her eyesight I’m worried about, because she is at risk for a form of blindness called macular degeneration. Paula is the youngest in a long line of redheads, several of whom have been diagnosed with this illness. Her fair-haired grandmother developed macular degeneration and was eventually unable to see her bridge hand and had to give up her golf game, just when she was threatening to score below her age. Fortunately, Paula should be able to avoid her grandmother’s fate, because we now have outstanding treatments for this disease.
Too bad these treatments are costing us billions more than they should. The price of some macular degeneration treatments is staggeringly high, and both doctors and the pharmaceutical company making the treatments are motivated to keep it that way. If we as a country want to forestall blindness in people like my wife, without going bankrupt in the process, we need to pressure our government to do some hardball negotiating.
By way of background, my grandmother-in-law suffered from what ophthalmologists call “wet” macular degeneration. Frail little blood vessels began proliferating in the back of her retina. It’s not unusual to have lots of blood vessels back in the retina. It’s that red blood, after all, that causes so many of us to look possessed in family photos, with red eyes staring demonically into the lens. But in wet macular degeneration, there’s even more blood vessels than normal in the back of the eye, and they are more inclined to leak than typical blood vessels. This leaking fluid damages the nerve cells we depend upon to see light and darkness. For years, there was little doctors could do to slow these leaks.
Then along came Avastin.
Some of you may recognize Avastin as being a cancer drug. That’s true. Avastin works by disrupting a chemical our body makes to promote blood vessel growth. Tumors that depend on new blood vessels to grow are thereby thwarted by the drug. So, too, is macular degeneration. No new frail blood vessels means no blood vessel leakage!
Many ophthalmologists treat wet macular degeneration by injecting Avastin directly into the back of patient’s eyeballs. (Under local anesthesia, of course!) And the drug isn’t even terribly expensive. By one estimate, Medicare pays about $50 a pop for monthly Avastin injections. There is a problem with this effective and affordable treatment, however. Avastin has never been approved by the FDA to treat macular degeneration. Physicians are allowed to use it as an off-label treatment, but because it is off label, it needs to be reformulated by pharmacies into an injectable form, and before standards for such reformulation were bolstered, some patients experienced eye infections from contaminated vials.
Fortunately, there is a second drug to treat macular degeneration, one very similar in its chemical composition, another blood vessel-blocking drug called Lucentis. Unlike Avastin, Lucentis is FDA-approved to treat the disease. That means it is made by the manufacturer in a ready-to-inject formulation, and there is no need for pharmacies to do any additional prepping. Lucentis is just as good as slowing the progression of macular degeneration as Avastin. There’s just one little problem with Lucentis, however. Instead of costing Medicare $50 per pop, it costs up to $2,000.
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