Cost of diabetes treatment doubles in just 7 years
If you’re suffering from Type II diabetes, you’re probably feeling a little lighter these days – in the wallet, anyway. A new study says that the cost of Type II diabetes drugs nearly doubled between 2001 and 2007. But the question remains: are diabetes sufferings getting better, or is Big Pharma’s bottom line the only thing that’s improving?
The joint study by the Stanford University and the University of Chicago says total spending on the diabetes treatments skyrocketed from $6.7 billion to a whopping $12.5 billion. Study author Dr. G. Caleb Alexander says the research uncovered “dramatic changes” in how diabetes is treated over the last 10 years and “significant increases in cost.”
I should say so. How many other industries (legal industries, anyway) doubled the cost of their products in a span of eight years? Of course, the huge cost increase is due to the stratospheric price of the standard name-brand Type II diabetes drugs (which happen to be 11 times higher than the old-school generic drugs). A monthly course of Januvia, the brand name for sitaglipin, will set you back $160. Meanwhile, Byetta (exenatide) is a staggering $210 per prescription.
But, Alexander said, “The million dollar question is: Are these changes going to lead to overall significant improvement in the outcomes that matter to patients and their doctors?”
I can tell you right now, if the “million dollar” answer involves Byetta, we can’t afford the improvement. You might remember that Byetta, a synthetic hormone used to treat Type II diabetes, was recently linked to some deadly incidences of pancreatitis.
I’d say this was a joke if I didn’t think it was such a crime. Recently, six new cases of a particularly deadly variety of pancreatitis were reported – all of which were tied to Byetta. In two of these cases, the patients died. Yet the only action that FDA officials took was to issue a statement that patients should stop taking the drug immediately if they develop acute pancreatitis.
Byetta generated $636 million in sales in just 2007 for its makers, Amylin Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Eli Lilly & Co; that’s 80 PERCENT of Amylin’s sales (though just 3 percent of Eli Lilly’s sales). And in spite of the deadly side effects for some (and the typically ineffectual FDA warning which resulted), the Byetta money machine keeps chugging along.
More and more doctors are prescribing drugs like Byetta not as a supplement to insulin treatments, but rather as an alternative to insulin. In fact, insulin use is actually in decline. But don’t for a minute think that this is because fewer people are developing Type II diabetes: on the contrary, more and more people are being diagnosed with this disease every year. By 2050, researchers estimate that as much as seven percent of Americans with be Type II diabetes sufferers.
And not only are diabetes patients getting lots of expensive, newer drugs – they’re being prescribed MORE of them. Now nearly half of all diabetes patients are regularly taking more than one prescription drug to deal with their condition. But as recently as 1994, more than 80 percent of all diabetes patients took only one medication.
Think about that for a minute: there are MORE diabetes patients taking MORE drugs than ever – and yet diabetes is still on the rise, and seems to be getting worse. Alexander blames this on a tendency for both doctors and their patients “to adopt newer therapies without sufficient evidence of their superiority or benefits over older, less expensive, more time-tested alternatives.”
Call me crazy, but maybe that has a little bit to do with the drug companies’ relentless pushing and promoting of their new drugs to both doctors and patients. As far as I can tell, it seems that the only ones getting better from the new infusion of Big Pharma drugs is, well … Big Pharma. And with more and more diabetes sufferers every year, I doubt that will change.
