Cancer patients should be treated by their doctors, not pharmacy benefit managers
If your mom was facing breast cancer or your son had brain cancer, do you want a pharmacy benefit manager determining their care, or their doctor?
When I must tell a patient that she or he has cancer, that diagnosis comes with the explicit promise that I will provide timely treatment, including medicines aimed at curing cancer or extending life as long as possible.
But an insidious interloper now often comes between me and my patients. I’m talking about pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), the middlemen that have introduced a bureaucratic and nightmarish system of delays and denials into filling prescriptions.
I’m not alone.
An oncologist in Florida determined that her patient with metastatic kidney cancer needed to start taking a standard, first-line oral medication. But the patient’s pharmacy benefit manager decided it knew better and refused to authorize the medication unless a surgeon first performed surgery to remove a tumor on the patient’s kidney — despite the fact that the patient’s surgeon had already determined that the procedure was too risky and the patient wasn’t a candidate for surgery, something the surgeon had previously told the PBM.