MEDICINE For faster drugs, U.S. beats Europe

Why the difference? Drugmakers can earn more in the United States.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
WASHINGTON -- If you want the latest medicines, the United States is the best place to get them.
Most studies show that American consumers now get new medications well in advance of Europeans, who only a dozen or so years ago were the first to get most new drugs.
Drug launches tend to be faster here because drugmakers have a huge incentive: They can earn more in the United States. Moreover, the U.S. government, responding to pressure from AIDS activists, other disease patients, and the drugmakers themselves, began an accelerated drug-approval process in the 1990s.
A Commerce Department report in December, for example, cited research showing that in the case of 15 cancer drugs, European approvals averaged 468 days vs. 273 in the United States. The problem is that, although you may be able to get medicines faster here, you may not be able to afford them.
More than 15 percent of the U.S. population -- 45 million people -- are without health insurance, 8.4 million of them children, which is 11 percent of all children under age 18. And those numbers are growing.
Little health care for many
The vast majority of uninsured people get little, if any, health care, said Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a liberal health-policy group that pushes for more affordable medical care. If they do, it is only when their ailment has reached an extremely serious stage.
All the while, prescription drugs are becoming ever more costly for U.S. consumers. This is especially the case with the latest generation of advanced cancer drugs such as Herceptin or Avastin, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year.
Europeans, by contrast, pay 35 percent to 55 percent less for medicines than Americans do. And because the social safety net is far more extensive in countries such as Germany and France, getting prescription drugs is not dependent on whether a patient has a private health insurance plan or is independently wealthy: Coverage for many medicines is guaranteed.