The Change Mariner

Healthcare Technology: Saves Lives, Busts Budgets

Forbes:

The cost of saving lives from heart disease just went through the roof.

At a meeting of cardiologists, doctors today presented results of a giant, 2,500-person government study showing that heart failure patients implanted with pricey cardiac defibrillators were 23% less likely to die over five years than patients who got standard drug therapy. The finding doubles the potential patient population eligible for defibrillators, which cost $25,000 or more installed--to roughly 1.2 million Americans from 600,000.

Meanwhile, two separate studies found that heart patients who got the highest, most expensive doses of Pfizer's cholesterol-lowering drug Lipitor were significantly less likely to have a heart attack or other cardiac event or die from heart disease than patients who got less expensive, standard doses of cholesterol-lowering medicines.

The unambiguous results are great news for the companies that make the new therapies, including Pfizer and defibrillator producers such as Medtronic, St. Jude Medical and Guidant.

But the results pose a budget-busting dilemma for patients, employers and other payers such as federal Medicare officials, who were hoping that medical costs might soon level off. How is the nation going to pay for all this life-saving new therapy?

"We cannot afford this" new technology," says Cleveland Clinic cardiologist Eric Topol. "In the last couple of years we have truly overridden our financial ability to deliver evidence-based medicine. We need a total makeover of our health care system to particularize the benefit -- that is, to match up those individuals who really derive benefit from expensive therapies."