More Shame

There's some interesting items worth noting in this article in Monday's New York Times, but here's what jumps out at me:

Mexico alone spends about $120 million buying Herceptin to treat women with breast cancer, which is nearly one-half of 1 percent of all government spending on health care, said Dr. Alejandro Mohar, general director of the Mexican National Cancer Institute. In 2007, Mexico guaranteed access to Herceptin for all women with breast cancer through a public insurance program.

“We would love to have better access to better drugs,” Dr. Mohar said. “This debate is going to heat up.”

Hermillia Villegas, a 47-year-old mother of two in Jalisco, Mexico, recently learned that she had a virulent form of breast cancer that responded well to treatment with Herceptin. Her husband is a janitor, and her doctor initially told her that each of 17 treatments with Herceptin would cost her more than $3,000.

“I don’t have that kind of money,” she said in a telephone interview. The new health insurance program, which pays for the whole cost of the drug, has saved her life, she said.

Imagine that: Mexico supplies this drug to citizens who cannot afford it, but those without insurance in the USA are out of luck.