Wall Street Journal
Herb Kohl, the chairman of the Senate’s Special Committee on Aging, asked the federal agency that runs Medicare some tough questions about the billions of dollars it may have to spend if lots of Medicare patients with a serious eye disease use Genentech’s Lucentis instead of the company’s Avastin.
Kohl’s letter, sent yesterday, cites a story that ran in the WSJ last week (and first appeared, in shorter form, in the Health Blog), describing a move by Genentech to block sales of the the drug to certain specialized pharmacies. That could make it more difficult for some patients to be treated with Avastin for an eye disease called wet macular degeneration.