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 The price of one popular drug prescribed under the state's 2008
Death With Dignity Act increased roughly $2,500 over seven years.
"As a medical oncologist, I see patients who request death with
dignity medications quite frequently," said Dr. Veena Shankaran, of
the University of Washington and the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research
Center in Seattle.
"There was one instance when a patient of mine asked how much it was
going to cost, and I had no idea," Shankaran, lead author of a paper
in JAMA Oncology, told Reuters Health.
To examine the price of the medications, Shankaran and colleagues
examined the 73 death with dignity prescriptions written and
dispensed since 2010 at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance.
The sedative secobarbital, branded as Seconal, made up nearly half
of the prescriptions. But the average cost of secobarbital increased
from $388 in 2010 to $2,878 in 2016, according to the researchers.
Pentobarbital, another sedative, accounted for 30 percent of the
prescriptions, but its use dropped after its manufacturer stopped
selling the drug to keep it from being used in state executions. Its
average price remained steady at $350 when it was prescribed from
2012 to 2014.
Shankaran's team reports that due to the increasing cost of
secobarbital in 2015 and 2016, 16 patients at Seattle Cancer Care
Alliance were referred to a compounding pharmacy that created a
lethal drug cocktail for $500.
It's uncommon for insurance companies to pay for these drugs, said
Shankaran. Patients would need to pay out of pocket.
"Honestly, I really think it’s just pharmaceutical companies jacking
up the price of the drug," she said. "I don’t see another
explanation for it."
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Valeant, which manufactures Seconal, released a statement in March
after California passed its own death with dignity law in 2015 and
questions arose about the drug's increasing cost.
At the time, the company said a drug's price is based on a number of
factors. Those include "the development or acquisition of a drug,
the availability of substitutes or generics, and the benefits it
offers versus alternative treatments that might be more costly."
Shankaran said people who choose death with dignity don't have much
of a voice since they are sick and close to the end of their lives.
Also, she pointed out, people with cancer who choose death with
dignity have already spent a lot of money on other treatments and
care.
"We do need to shed light on this in hopes that there will be some
regulation over this," she said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2ekESnG JAMA Oncology, online October 6, 2016.
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