For those affected by this debilitating disease, a price control on cancer drugs can bring at least short-term relief
In his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Emperor of All Maladies, oncologist-author Siddhartha Mukherjee calls cancer the “defining plague of our generation”. A rather morbid description of a disease that until recently trailed infectious diseases, particularly in India, in garnering public policy attention, but is now inching up on the government’s agenda.
The government revised its list of essential medicines after eight years, and the new list includes drugs for treating cancer. Once the New List of Essential Medicines (NLEM) is notified, the Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilisers will push for imposing price control on all the drugs on the list. This could have been triggered by the Supreme Court’s directive to the government to do so. Right now, the government controls the price of only 74 of the 354 drugs on the list.(This story appears in the 17 June, 2011 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)