When Californiastakes effect this June, could be faced with a hefty bill for the lethal medication. It retails for more than $3,000.
Valeant Pharmaceuticals, the company that makes the drug most commonly prescribed by physicians to aid patients who want to end their lives, doubledthe drugsprice last year, one month after California lawmakers.
Its just pharmaceutical company greed, said David Grube, a retired a family doctor in Oregon, where physician-assisted death has been legal for 20 years.
The drug is Seconal, or secobarbital, its generic name. Originally developed in the 1930s as a sleeping pill, it fell out of favor when people died from taking too much or from taking it in combination with alcohol. But when intended as a lethal medication to hasten the death of someone suffering from a terminal disease, Seconal is the drug of choice.
It works very quickly and very gently, says Grube, who is also the national medical director for Compassion and Choices, an advocacy group. People fall asleep with no complications. Its a very gentle passing.
In 2009, Grube remembers the price of a lethal dose of Seconal 100 capsules was less than $200. During the next six years, it shot up to $1,500, according to drug price databases Medi-Span and First Databank. Then Valeant bought Seconal last February and immediately doubled the price to $3,000.
Most drug companies justify such hikes by pointing to high research costs. But Grube says thats not the case with Seconal. Its been around for 80 years.
Its not a complicated thing to make, theres no research being done on it, theres no development, he says. That to me is unconscionable.
Valeant bought several other drugsat the same time it bought Seconal, raising some of those prices as much as 500 percent. That sparked a congressional investigation into its pricing practices. (The companys Monday).
Valeant sets prices for drugs based on a number of factors, the company said in a statement, including the cost of developing or acquiring the drug, the availability of generics and the benefits of the drug compared with costly alternative treatments. When possible, we offer patient assistance programs to mitigate the effects of price adjustments and keep out-of-pocket costs affordable for patients.
The most likely explanation for raising the price of Seconal is the lackof generics, says Mick Kolassa, founding partner of Medical Marketing Economics, a firm that advises drug companies on how to price and market their drugs.
Seconal went off patent in the early 1990s. There were some generics for a while, but then demand shrank and manufacturers abandoned them.
So that meant when the current company bought it, they didnt have any generic competition, simply because the market got so small that it left, Kolassa said. So in situations like that, a company can acquire it and raise the price.
Kolassa says its also possible that the demand for even the brand-name drug is so low that its hard to recoup the costs of making and selling it.
Heres a company that said, Well, we can raise the price, keep it on the market and make some money with it. Or we can walk away and the product goes away, he said.
Whatever the explanation, what cancer patients like Elizabeth Wallner see is a drug company taking advantage. She has one word to describe the pharmaceutical executive who decided to double the price of Seconal: Scumbag.
Wallner was diagnosed with Stage 4 colon cancer five years ago. It spread to her liver and lungs. She always thought that if her suffering became too unbearable, she would consider ending her life. But she never thought about the price tag of the lethal drug.
Youre going to make money off my death, she said.
Shes most worried about her son.
You are literally, at that point, taking the money from children, she said. Everything I have, if Im going to die tomorrow, everything I have will be left to my son who will be 20 years old and almost 100 percent on his own.
Under the California aid-in-dying law, it is optional for health insurance companies to cover the costs of the practice. Most private insurers plan to do so, according to the California Association of Health Plans.
So does the states.
But for patients who arent covered, there is a cheaper alternative: a three-part drug cocktail that can be mixed by a compounding pharmacy for about $400.
Grube says the cocktail works just as well, but doctors usually dontprescribe itbecause of the hassle some patients have to go through to get it. Seconal, on the other hand, is a ready-made pill, routinely available at most retail drugstores.
He says advocacy groups are working on campaigns to reduce drug costs and toand patients about the law.
My dream is that any Californian who will choose aid in dying would have few burdens or barriers to jump through, Grube said.
Katie Orr contributed reporting from Sacramento.
This story is part of a partnership that includes , and Kaiser Health News.
