The Mayo Clinic leads a protest against drug company greed.
“Cancer is a very scary,” Dr. Ayalew Tefferi, the lead author, told NPR. “Everybody’s shocked. But they don’t know about the second shock coming, and that is the financial destruction that’s coming with it. That comes in the course of treatment. That comes after the patient dies. All of a sudden, they see that their lifelong savings is being given to drug companies.”
Tefferi blamed drug company greed, physicians who are too quick to prescribe new drugs without proven efficacy, health insurers willing to go along with pricing with upwards of $3,000-a-month co-pays, and a lack of federal government oversight adding checks and balances to a Wild West of drug pricing, especially for the federal health plan for seniors, Medicare, which is barred from negotiating drug prices. That prohibition was signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2003.
At www.alternet.org
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