Legal Commentary

The tough choices of health care finance reform

By Tom Kirkendall

Following on a point made in this recent post, this Avery Johnson/WSJ article addresses one of the tough issues that must be addressed if there is going to be any meaningful reform of the U.S. health care finance system:

The widespread use of expensive cancer drugs to prolong patients’ lives by just weeks or months was called into question by an article published Monday in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Crunching data from published studies, the authors found that treating a lung-cancer patient with Erbitux, a drug that costs $80,000 for an 18-week regimen, prolongs survival by only 1.2 months.

Based on that estimate, extending the lives of the 550,000 Americans who die of cancer annually by one year would then cost $440 billion, they extrapolated.

How to control escalating spending on end-of-life care is one of the thorniest questions facing lawmakers working on the overhaul of the U.S. health-care system. [.  .  .]

“Many Americans would not regard a 1.2-month survival advantage as ‘significant’ progress,” the authors wrote. “But would an individual patient disagree? Although we lack the answer to that question, we would suggest that the death of a mother of four at age 37 years would be no less painful were it to occur at age 37 years and 1 month, nor would the passing of a 67-year-old who planned to travel after retiring be any less difficult for the spouse were it to have occurred one month later.”

While some policy experts consider the rationing of health-care resources inevitable in the quest to control medical spending, many Americans have long resisted putting the collective fiscal good over their individual health.  .   .   .

Read the entire article. I have many reservations about the direction of the Obama Administration's proposed reforms of the U.S. health care finance system. But that the proposed reforms are triggering discussion of key issues such as the one set forth above is not one of them.

Full post as published by Houston's Clear Thinkers on July 01, 2009 (boomark / email).