High cancer drug prices targeted

The pushback against soaring cancer drug prices is gaining steam. A leading doctors group on Monday proposed a formula to help patients decide if a medicine is worth it — what it will cost them and how much good it is likely to do.

The move by the American Society of Clinical Oncology is the third recent effort to focus on value in cancer care. Two weeks ago, the European Society for Medical Oncology proposed a similar guide. Last week, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York posted an online tool suggesting a drug’s fair price, based on benefits and side effects.

“We have a broken system” with drug prices rising more than the degree of benefit, said Dr. Peter Bach, director of the Center for Health Policy and Outcomes at Sloan Kettering.

New cancer drugs typically cost more than $10,000 a month, and patients are paying a greater share through higher copays and deductibles.

“We have extraordinarily expensive technology that we have developed but a lot of it doesn’t seem to move the needle that much” in terms of survival, Michael Porter, a Harvard Business School economist, said last month.

Patients often are not fully aware of costs, which include not just the drug but also whether a patient needs to be hospitalized to get it, or to take other drugs to manage side effects, he said.