WILL WASHINGTON SENTENCE LYMPHOMA PATIENTS TO DEATH?

The answer is yes, if Congress doesn’t act quickly. In a tale that defies belief, Bexxar and Zevalin have become mired in an governmental accounting error that will result in their no longer being available unless Congress fixes the error before January 1. And if they don’t? Some of the 500,000 lymphoma patients in the United States will surely die.

As most of you know, these drugs have yielded response rates as high as 95% even for patients who have failed other types of treatments. And with some patients in complete remission for many years, even after nothing else worked, some doctors are even beginning to whisper the word “cure.”

For all Washington’s talk of its commitment to curing cancer, you’d think these drugs would be hailed as the miracles they are. Wrong.

Each year, the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) tells hospitals and doctors how much they’ll be paid for drugs, services and procedures. CMS decided that payments for Bexxar and Zevalin, in 2008, will be cut to about half of what hospitals have to pay for them. With a shortfall that hospitals can’t possibly absorb, the drugs simply can’t be offered to patients.

Why on earth would a federal agency do this? From the day these drugs were approved in 2002 and 2003, they didn’t fit neatly into any CMS category. Rather than creating a new category for a new class of therapy, CMS forced them into existing ones, much like trying to force a square peg into a round hole. The flawed accounting methodology has worsened each year until it finally doomed these drugs to their own deaths. Even more unbelievable is that the agency’s report admits to basing its decision on flawed data!

So where does this leave people who need the drugs? It leaves a 19-year-old woman begging for her future. A 37-year-old father pleading to watch his two boys grow up. An active 67-year-old grandmother, who has no other options, facing death. And it leaves angry families calling this blunder “bureaucratic genocide.”

Physicians and organizations representing them have weighed in, too. Dr. Richard Wahl of Johns Hopkins says, “The prospect of their (Bexxar and Zevalin) not being available due to CMS is criminal.” And patients with other forms of cancer are wondering if this could happen to drugs that could possibly save their lives.

Time is short, but Congress can fix this horrible mistake. If they don’t, their fellow Americans will surely pay dearly…with their lives. And the 10.5 million cancer survivors plus their families will surely remember that when they go to the polls.

If you haven’t already, I urge you to write and call your representatives as soon as possible! Let them know this ruling simply cannot stand.

Betsy