The Problem
A few weeks ago, we received an urgent message from Sheila, our practice’s nurse manager: “We have three patients on the upcoming schedule who need cisplatin(Drug information on cisplatin). I just tried to order this from the distributor and none is available.” Once again an already busy clinic was faced with the recurring issue of “drug triage.” How much do we have on the shelf? Can anyone’s treatment safely be delayed? Can we send anyone to the hospital for treatment if they have some in stock? In the end, one patient was treated from existing inventory at a marginally reduced dose, one patient was sent to the hospital, and one patient had his initial treatment delayed one week.
David Eagle, MD
Stories such as these abound in the media. Some patients with curable diseases are not receiving life-saving chemotherapy drugs, and equivalent substitutes are often unavailable. Treatment delays that potentially threaten patient outcomes are common. Clinical trials that add investigational agents to known effective generics have been suspended, and patient enrollment has been discontinued.
Nationally, the number of drug shortages has tripled since 2005.[1] Our county’s hospice agency has experienced shortages of liquid morphine, scopolamine patches, and medications to relieve nausea. Other generic drug shortages in our clinic have included paclitaxel(Drug information on paclitaxel), leucovorin, and doxorubicin(Drug information on doxorubicin). We have had limited ability to order fluorouracil(Drug information on fluorouracil) (5-FU) and mitomycin(Drug information on mitomycin). Depending on the dosage, the drug cost for a single treatment of cisplatin is about $25 to $40. For a country that spends an enormous 17% of its gross domestic product on health care, how can something this economical and valuable to patients be in short supply? What will be required to fix this? These are the questions that physicians, policy makers, and others are currently focused on.
The Causes
Ten to twenty years ago, oncologists maintained drug inventories in their offices. As drug prices rose and margins shrank, just-in-time delivery began to flourish. Oncology offices became dependent on being able to obtain drugs quickly from distributors. Now, availability is no longer reliable and offices are caught off-guard; they may discover that a patient scheduled for treatment in two days will not get his or her drug. Why?
A plethora of contributing causes have been postulated: raw material shortages, quality recalls, production problems, new FDA standards that force plant upgrades, consolidation among manufacturers, and insufficient or negative profit margins on generic drugs, among others. Are we suffering from a strange confluence of adverse events that have caused the generic drug shortage, or is one cause determinative? Answering this question correctly is critical since we risk wasting valuable time and resources if we attempt to solve the wrong problems. More importantly, patients will continue to suffer. And consider: we are not seeing any production issues with branded products produced by single-source suppliers. Is price the determinative factor?
It is easy to conclude that the primary cause of the shortage is economic. In a functional market place, a shortage results in rising prices. Manufacturers are then enticed into the market place to produce the product. The shortage disappears when product demand, product availability, and price find a new equilibrium. Why is this not happening here?
In 2003, the Medicare Modernization Act was signed into law. This changed both the formula for drug reimbursement and the ability of prices to fluctuate. Drugs are now reimbursed at average sales price (ASP) plus 6%. The ASP is updated quarterly, but government regulation requires a 6-month delay before the reimbursement rate can be changed. If manufacturers need to raise the price, they can only do so by 6% every 6 months. If they exceed a 6% increase, purchasers are reimbursed at less than acquisition cost. The result is an asymmetric pricing mechanism in which it is much easier for prices to fall than to rise. If the cost of production increases for any reason, such as an expensive FDA mandate regarding the production process, then a manufacturer’s cost of production may exceed its anticipated revenues from sales. Rational business entities may therefore choose to drop out of the market.
In a recent publication, Gatesman and Smith assert that the contributing cause of the shortage is that oncologists have less incentive to use generics instead of brand-name drugs.[2] This is profoundly incorrect. Falling demand does not create shortages. Is it plausible to think that oncologists treating acute leukemia do not want to use cytarabine(Drug information on cytarabine) because it is generic? Furthermore, unit sales for generics increased 30% between 2006 and 2010.[3] Again, if we get the causes of the shortage wrong, we delay the solutions that our patients need us to find.
