Japan Press Weekly

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2016 November 16 - 22 [SOCIAL ISSUES]

JCP Diet questioning leads to halving of expensive cancer drug price

The Health Ministry on November 16 decided to halve the official price of the super-expensive cancer drug “opdivo”, after being grilled by Japanese Communist Party Secretariat Head Koike Akira at a Diet meeting.

The cost of the opdivo treatment is 35 million yen a year a patient. Japan’s public health insurance programs started to cover the use of the drug for skin cancer in 2014 and for lung cancer in the following year. This enabled around 20,000 patients to take the medicine, which is a heavy financial burden on the public insurance program.

JCP Koike on October 6 at a House of Councilors Budget Committee meeting stressed that the current opdivo price is so high that it looks as though it was arbitrarily set by the manufacturer. Criticizing a 25%-cut in the drug price as inadequate, the government’s initial plan, Koike called for a further price cut. Health Minister Shiozaki Yasuhisa admitted that the price is at a very high level.

Under the current rules on official drug prices, the government can implement a price cut of up to 50% for a drug when its annual sales exceeded 150 billion yen. The Health Ministry will reduce the opdivo price in half in February 2017 since the drug sales are estimated to stand at 151.6 billion yen in Fiscal Year 2016.