Modern medical care has become a giant industry. Instead of being focused on you, it’s focused on an inexhaustible appetite for ever-increasing profits.
Everyone respects the good people searching for cancer cures. But the accelerating cost of cancer drugs? Even oncologists are saying enough is enough.
“Americans with cancer pay 50 percent to 100 percent more for the same patented drug than patients in other countries,” says S. Vincent Rajkumar who is with the Mayo Clinic Cancer Center. “As oncologists we have a moral obligation to advocate for affordable cancer drugs for our patients.”
Rajkumar and several other cancer doctors put together a report on how drug companies are gouging cancer patients with overpriced drugs. The report, in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, discusses the ways in which these high prices are complicating cancer care in the U.S.
As the doctors point out, the average price for cancer drugs sufficient for about a year of therapy went from $5,000 to $10,000 by the year 2000. Then, from 2000 to 2012, the price topped $100,000.
The doctors say the pharmaceutical industry’s argument that the inflated prices of these drugs goes to pay for research and development doesn’t cut it. Plus, although competition in the marketplace is supposed to control prices, these companies are not operating in a free market.
“One of the facts that people do not realize is that cancer drugs for the most part are not operating under a free market economy,” says Rajkumar. “The fact that there are five approved drugs to treat an incurable cancer does not mean there is competition. Typically, the standard of care is that each drug is used sequentially or in combination, so that each new drug represents a monopoly with exclusivity granted by patent protection for many years.”
A big problem: Legislation keeps Medicare from negotiating drug prices. That inflates costs and lets companies name their own prices.
The doctors’ recommendations include
- Allow patients to buy their drugs overseas where the pharmaceuticals are cheaper.
- Put restrictions in place that limit drug company’s ability and incentive to keep generic drugs off the market.
- Let Medicare negotiate drug prices.
Right now drug companies are manipulating the marketplace to their own advantage and stifling competition. Those circumstances, combined with the suppression of information about natural alternatives to conventional drugs, are keeping many folks hooked on expensive pharmaceuticals that leave them in bankruptcy.
If you’ve got cancer and you’re undergoing any form of treatment, you’ll be happy to learn that there are natural ways to help fight cancer.
One of the easiest to afford and follow is the Rath Amino Acids protocol. The Rath protocol is intended to stop cancer from spreading by cutting off its path to other tissues and organs. [1] So it fights cancer all by itself, and it can also aid other kinds of cancer therapies as well.
You take a mixture of vitamin C (14,000 mg/day), L-Lysine (12,000 mg/day), L-Proline (2,000 mg/day), L-Arginine (2,000 mg/day), a green tea extract called EGCG (or green tea itself), and Coenzyme Q10 (480 mg/day).
[1] Netke S, Roomi M, Ivanov V, Niedzwiecki A, Rath M. “A Specific Combination Of Ascorbic Acid, Lysine, Proline And Epigallocatechin Gallate Inhibits Proliferation And Extracellular Matrix Invasion Of Various Human Cancer Cell Lines.” Emerging Drugs, 2003; Vol II.
