The Medicine That Kills
 
The pandemic in recent years raised more awareness for issues concerning medical insurance. Aside from vaccines, the public relied mostly upon insurance for some comfort during this time of turmoil. A merit widely known is that insurance will cover the cost of prescription drugs. The coverage alleviates pressure from the shoulders of middle-class families, especially those with a member who has been suffering from chronical diseases. However, there are also drugs that either remain significantly over-priced or not covered by insurances in several regions. Although there are justifications to the high prices such as developing drugs requiring years of endeavour, the detrimental consequences these high prices bestowed upon people who cannot afford the medicine should not be neglected. At times, it could be the last straw for them.
 
Take Synthroid for example, a prescription drug used for treating Hashimoto’s disease--- an autoimmune condition where antibodies attack the host’s thyroid cells. The disease is not fatal as long as treated properly, but there is no cure for it. The patient will have to take Synthroid on a long-term basis in order to keep the condition in check. In the United States, about 1-2 percent of the population are troubled by this condition every year. Although 1-2 percent does not seem like much, considering the 300 million population, 1-2 percent is a large number. Since taking Synthroid is a long-term process, if the price was not cheap, many patients will not be able to afford it after some periods of time. Fortunately, with the help of medical insurance coverage, the price of Synthroid dropped to as low as $3.30, affordable for many. The low price has alleviated pressure for hundreds and thousands of families.
 
However, Synthroid was a rare case. Take Imatinib, usually called Gleevec, as an example. It is a drug used for treating chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), a long-term blood cancer that would produce large amounts of dysfunctional white blood cells to replace the functional ones. When the drug first got approved in 2001, it was praised as “the breakthrough” in cancer research. Gleevec was the first targeted treatment that will precisely inhibit the cells expressing the BCR-Abl gene, a mutated allele resulting in CML. If the growth of these cells is halted, the cancer can be stopped. The usual life expectancy of a person with CML is merely 5 years, and only 30% of the patients have that privilege. The introduction of Gleevec raised this number to 89%; even after 5 years, 98% of the patients’ white blood cell and platelet counts have returned to normal.
 
Just as the millions of patients around the world celebrate the discovery of a new hope, reality smacked them with a heavy strike. According to a brief released by CED in 2007, the cost of monthly supplies of imatinib is between $3070-4605. What’s worse is that even if under insurance, the price did not decrease but instead doubled to $8000-9000.
 
The situation with most of the drugs treating “rare” diseases are more or less similar to that of Gleevec. Since the discovery of the “Philadelphia Chromosome” 1960, it has been 41 years of endless endeavour, day and night, towards curing cancer. It is inevitable that the corporation will charge high prices to balance out its costs. This is the reason why a possible alternative solution, such as advocating for better insurance coverage, counteracting this high price dilemma needs to be considered. It is never the disease that kills, but poverty and policy. Hopefully future medical insurances will be able to cover larger portions of the prices of these lifesaving “rare drugs”