Wear all the Pink You Want: It's Not Stopping Rationing of Breast Cancer Drugs

Commenters over at Stilton Jarlsberg's Hope n' Change Cartoons have been discussing who is going to be weeded out after they're done weeding out old people. Young kids with serious health problems or gays with expensive-to-treat HIV/AIDS? To which I might add: people with relatively rare and hard-to-diagnose health problems or people seriously injured in major auto accidents? And then there are those pesky women with late-stage breast cancer, who are already being denied medical treatment in the People's Republic of Oregon.

Perhaps the bean counters in the gov't bureaucrat-run socialist health care system (who are paid with our tax dollars!) will go after everybody with a costly medical problem to keep the electorate confused and fatigued so that we just get sick of fighting them and give up.

A little something that the government was up to while you were trimming your Christmas tree and doing your last-minute shopping was reversing its previous approval of the world's best-selling cancer drug for treatment of advanced breast cancer. This drug, Avastin, also is used to limit the growth of cancerous colon, brain, kidney, and lung tumors.

Many women with late-stage breast cancer who take Avastin live an additional three to five months, which the government does not consider "sufficient" benefit, even though taking the drug does improve quality of life for those women.

However, for reasons not yet understood, some women who take Avastin live much longer, even years longer. "It is clear that some breast cancer patients derive substantial benefit from Avastin," said Dr. Julie Gralow of the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, who helped conduct the initial study of Avastin in breast cancer. "We don't know how to select those tumors or patients yet." 

Government solution: restrict access to this expensive drug for women on Medicare and Medicaid, even though Avastin is approved for treatment of late-stage breast cancer in Europe. "Patients with colorectal, lung, renal and brain cancers will still have access to Avastin through Medicare," but not patients with breast cancer.

In the eyes of this administration, women who are dying of breast cancer, especially those over the age of 65 or poor, are not worth the cost of treatment with the world's best-selling cancer drug. As Stilton Jarlsberg pointed out:

The alleged "cost savings" come from denial of expensive care to those who most need it, in order to fund more people being added to the government coffers. It's "inefficient" for lots of money to be spent on one person who is nearing death...which is why Obamacare levies fines (in the form of additional taxes) on people who have paid for "too much" health insurance with their own money.


And in determining what sort of medical treatment people will receive under Obamacare, consider some of the decisions that are already being made: the government is increasingly refuse to pay for medicines that will improve the quality of life, but not "cure" a condition. Which should terrify anyone with HIV...or cancer...or any geriatric illness.


Obamacare is not about medicine; it's about power and wealth redistribution. And part of shepherding the "wealth" is making sure the "unfit" won't share in it...even if they're the ones who earned it and contributed it (albeit not voluntarily) to the system.

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