After concluding that because myeloma drugs keep people alive longer they cost too much to be cost-effective, ICER through it’s Midwest Comparative Effectiveness Public Advisory Council (Midwest CEPAC) is now looking at new drugs for treating people with non small lung cancer.
And ICER’s Steve Pearson wants you to know that he and his organization care about patients. ICER’s website has a video of Pearson speaking before the Midwest CEPAC meeting entitled: “Why we are here today” – Dr. Pearson underscores the moral vision of the Midwest CEPAC” (Yes, that's the title
In proclaiming this moral vision Pearson said: “we really want to know from patients what outcomes matter most to them.”
He also claims that the quality adjusted life year does not mean a life is “less valuable if they have or disability. a gain is a gain wherever you are starting from. Sometimes there are conditions where we have a serious condition and the first possible treatment, that’s an important consideration.”
These are outright falsehoods that hide Pearson’s real moral vision.
Pearson – and ICER – are using a superficially low QALY measure that does NOT take into account what matters to patients, by overstating and misrepresenting the price of new medicines and by clearly using budget caps to cut off and ration care.
And ICER’s metrics and methods are indeed driven by Pearson’s moral vision which he stated clearly in an article entitled: “Which Orphans Will Find a Home: The Rule of Rescue in Resource Allocation for Rare Diseases” where he tells us what he really thinks about lung cancer patients:
(Spoiler alert: Pearson thinks lung cancer patients are underserving whiners. )
Before directly attacking lung cancer patients, Pearson argues “There is no apparent obligation to rescue identifiable rare disease patients based on a duty of rescue within personal morality.”
But what about, as Pearson said, taking into account new treatments for people with the most serious conditions and few options?
“In practice, however, a sickest-first principle might require allocation of resources even when only minor gains can be achieved and the cost is very high, which is obviously inefficient…coverage decisions must not only incorporate consideration of the benefits gained
but the opportunity costs incurred when covering expensive orphan drugs.
And contrary to Pearson’s claim about not considering cost in recommending what drugs to use, he clearly regards the growing number of expensive therapies that offer benefit only to small populations” to “ensure that an undue burden is not
placed on others for the sake of a few.”
Then Pearson goes on to show that people with non small cell lung cancer aren’t worth spending money on based on his/ICER’s estimate of opportunity cost.
First, he claims, contrary to his desire to engage patients, that patient advocacy is a pain in the ass that gets in the way of making cost-based decisions for the good of all:
“Publicity can be a powerful and important tool for advocacy groups, but it is not an appropriate ethical justification for coverage of particular orphan drugs over others.”
Note that people said the same thing when AIDS activists were demanding faster and broader access to new medicines.
And he singles out people with lung cancer as a patient group that is unethically using advocacy: the pressure to treat every (lung cancer) patient is a product of lobbying and driven largely by the heightened public consciousness surrounding lung cancer.”
With that bias, Pearson then applies ICER’s benchmark for limiting access to new drugs (in this case Erbitux or cetuximab) based on QALY and budget impact:
“Lung cancer is often lethal, but the marginal benefits of cetuximab are quite modest. The average survival advantage from adding cetuximab to the standard treatment regimen is approximately five weeks. Cetuximab treatment is also associated with higher frequencies of rash, diarrhea, and febrile neutropenia, a condition that increases the risk of infection. And, lastly, cetuximab is expensive at both the individual and
population level.
Although nonsmall cell lung cancer is technically a rare disease, 60,000 patients are diagnosed with the illness each year in the United States. The treatment costs for each individual patient average approximately $80,000, which translates into an expenditure of $4.8
billion dollars per year. " (My note: In fact, Erbitux total revenues worldwide in 2015 were $2.2 billion)
Pearson concludes: “Considering the sources of identifiability (patient advocacy), the marginal impact on the length and quality of life, and the implicit opportunity costs of this level of expenditure, our framework would suggest that public and private insurers would be justified in refusing to pay for cetuximab.”
Pearson believes that unless someone like ICER decides what a life is worth and how much to spend on it, people with rare and fatal conditions – the sickest first -- will be “siphoning off resources for other things we need like better schools and more resources for local police, roads and bridges.”
That’s Pearson’s true moral vision. Refuse to pay for lung cancer drugs and spend the dough on pothole repair.
