“Making Cancer Drugs Less Expensive” Linking Clinical Value to Price
In an opinion piece in the Washington Post, Hagop Kantarjian, Leonard Zwelling, and Tito Fojo offer a perspective on cancer drug prices as well as advice on how to reduce prices.
In his book “Justum Pretium,” Aristotle discusses the relationship between price and worth, a topic continued 16 centuries later by Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. They concluded that out of moral necessity, price must reflect worth. As oncologists mindful of the expensive technology and therapeutics we employ, we agree with this.
We believe that the price of cancer drugs is too high. Those already-high prices, which continue to rise rapidly, are an increasingly significant issue in U.S. health-care expenditures.
