US cancer clinics rejecting patients over budget cuts

The Washington Post said in a recent article that the spending cuts had tightened budgets in cancer clinics across the US, making it impossible to administer expensive chemotherapy drugs.
 
    “If we treated the patients receiving the most expensive drugs, we’d be out of business in six months to a year,” said Jeff Vacirca, chief executive of North Shore Hematology Oncology Associates in New York.
 
 
Cancer clinics in the US repeatedly reject patients, forcing them to seek more expensive treatment at hospitals that may be overloaded beyond capacity, the Post added.
 
The report also stated that Vacirca’s clinics had decided that they would reject more than one-third of their 16,000 Medicare patients due to the budget cuts.
 
“The drugs we’re going to lose money on we’re not going to administer right now,” Vacirca said.
 
Health care practitioners have criticized the sequester budget cuts among high drug prices.
 
Ted Okon, director of the Community Oncology Alliance, said, “This is a drug that we’re purchasing. The costs don’t change and you can’t do without it. There isn’t really wiggle room.”
 
In March, federal regulators pushed measures for the US Supreme Court to stop big pharmaceutical corporations from paying generic drug competitors to delay releasing their cheaper versions of brand-name drugs.
 
US President Barack Obama signed into effect on March 1 the spending cuts, known as the sequester, which will take $85 billion from the US federal budget in 2013, while cutting “vital services for children, seniors, our men and women in uniform and their families.”
 
The sequester cuts, designed in 2011, could also affect the salaries for 7,200 specialists for children with disabilities.