Two letters to the editor of USA Today on Tuesday responded to an article published on July 11 that examined how the high prices of new cancer medications -- as much as $10,000 monthly for one treatment -- have raised concerns among patients and health insurers. Summaries of the letters appear below.

• Robert Goldberg: The article indicated that "because most new drugs don't 'cure' cancer for most patients, they shouldn't be so expensive," Goldberg, vice president of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest, writes. However, according to Goldberg, new cancer medications "increased the life expectancy of people diagnosed with cancer by about one year" between 1975 and 1995, and the mortality rate from the disease has decreased faster since 1995 than at any other time, according to Goldberg. He adds that the article focused on "studies that tested drugs assigned for specific groups from the results of one-size-fits-all studies," rather than studies that "matched the right drug to the right patient well before the disease advances." Goldberg concludes, "USA Today wonders why people have to shell out money for cancer drugs. It should have asked why health plans cover the entire cost of cheaper and less effective drugs but not Avastin" (Goldberg, USA Today, 7/18).
  
  
• Sally Pipes: The claim in the article by Marcia Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, that pharmaceutical companies are "exploiting the desperation of people with life-threatening illness" is "utter nonsense," Pipes, president and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute, writes. She writes that Angell is "an outspoken advocate of socialist health care and government-imposed price controls on drugs," adding that the "irony is that if she had her way, a drug such as Avastin would have never been invented in the first place." New cancer medication cost about $1 billion to develop, Pipes writes, adding, "If our government makes these drugs unprofitable" through price controls, "companies will simply stop trying to invent them." According to Pipes, "interference in drug pricing caused $188 billion in lost spending on research and development" between 1960 and 2001. She concludes, "The 'lost' medicines that might have been developed with the money could have saved about 140 million life years" (Pipes, USA Today, 7/18).