Doctors object to High Cancer-Drug Prices

More than 100 oncologists from top cancer hospitals around the U.S. have issued a harsh rebuke over soaring cancer-drug prices and called for new regulations to control them.Top cancer experts called Thursday for steps to curb the rapidly escalating price of oncology drugs, warning that the current trajectory “will affect millions of Americans and their immediate families, often repeatedly.”
The physicians are the latest in a growing roster of objectors to drug prices. Critics from doctors to insurers to state Medicaid officials have voiced alarm about prescription drug prices, which rose more than 12% last year in the U.S., the biggest annual increase in a decade, according to the nation’s largest pharmacy-benefit manager.

In 2014, the physicians noted, every new drug approved by the Food and Drug Administration was priced at more than $120,000 per year. And the cost for each additional year lived by a patient has skyrocketed from $54,000 in 1995 to $207,000 in 2013.