STATE TIMES NEWS
SRINAGAR: Following the recent price cap on cardiac stents by National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority (NPPA), Doctors Association Kashmir (DAK) on Wednesday sought a similar cap on the prices of pacemakers and cancer drugs.
President DAK Dr Nisar ul Hassan in a statement said that price ceiling will make these life-saving devices affordable to patients and will save lives.
There is a clear and urgent necessity to lower their prices to keep them available and affordable to patients, he said adding that all these innovations and advances are meaningless if patients cannot afford them.
With hospitals and doctors getting huge cuts, patients are pushed to financial misery, he said adding that there is a dire need to fix prices to check this unethical profiteering and exploitive pricing.
For a conventional pacemaker, cost is in the range of Rs 45,000 to 2.3 lakh, which is a huge financial burden on patients, he said adding that pacemaker is life-saving when the native heart pacemaker stops working or there is a block in heart’s conduction system.
Cancer patients miss out on life-saving cancer drugs because of unaffordable costs.
The cost of Cabazitaxil, the drug used to treat advanced prostate cancer, is as much as Rs 57 lakh over a year.
Torisel (Temsirolimus), which is used for advanced renal cell cancer costs to the patient Rs 36 lakh a year.
Another anti-cancer drug Crizalk (Crizotinib) used to treat advanced lung cancer is priced Rs 11 lakh a year.
Patients have to take loans or sell their property to buy these medicines. Poor patients have no resources to buy them and they simply die.
