Cost of radonc less than EPO?

[thesauce]

Does anyone know where to find that stat from ASTRO awhile back that claims all of the radonc costs less than EPO? I remember us talking about it.

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[Chartreuse Wombat]

Does anyone know where to find that stat from ASTRO awhile back that claims all of the radonc costs less than EPO? I remember us talking about it.

Tim Williams when he was president of ASTRO used a slide in just about every talk he gave, one that I cannot find. The information below supports the basic argument (Drugs much more expensive than XRT) but there are issues with office-based practices, etc

Estimated spending for Medicare on taken from WP 2012 article at link-

"For years, Epogen was one of a trio of anemia drugs — all manufactured by Amgen, a California biotech firm — that cost Medicare as much as $3 billion annually. Overall U.S. sales of the drugs exceeded $8 billion."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/busi...6503a2-dbf8-11e1-8e43-4a3c4375504a_story.html

Estimated Medicare spending in 2010 taken from Figure in paper at link-

http://www.jop.ascopubs.org/content/early/2014/04/22/JOP.2013.001270.full

Circa 2010 <2B$ for OFFICE BASED PRACTICE...3B$ for anemia drugs.

Caveat (again). This is office-based and I can't find a total budget for XRT in a more contemporary sample.

The larger point is that drugs more expensive than XRT...can only be made worse given the series of "precision" molecules that have been developed in the last five years.

We should be good stewards but important to provide some context.

 

[thesauce]

Thanks, C.W.

Still hoping someone has a slide with comparison to radonc costs. I've giving a presentation and it would be a bit simpler to explain.

 

[subatomicdoc]

Thanks, C.W.

Still hoping someone has a slide with comparison to radonc costs. I've giving a presentation and it would be a bit simpler to explain.

There are data, but you'd have to get updated numbers from EPO; it may have been scaled back since then. Look at bevacizumab, rituximab, trastuzumab for therapy drugs as possible comparisons.

Alternatively, think of this comparison: pharma ships excess drug and charges $3B in wasted chemo annually:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/01/h...costs-3-billion-a-year-a-study-says.html?_r=0