There’s never a good time or place to be diagnosed with cancer. But some times and places are worse than others.
Right now, cancer patients in Europe face record-setting wait times when seeking cutting-edge treatment. Once European regulators approve a new oncology drug, it takes 655 days, on average, for Europe’s government-run insurance systems to start offering it to patients.
That nearly 22-month delay can make the difference between life and death. And it’s precisely why our leaders in Washington ought to think twice before seeking to import Europe’s drug-pricing tactics.
Those statistics come from a sobering new study from the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, which examined 168 new medicines approved by continental regulators from 2021 through 2024. It found that the average time for a medicine to become available in the European Union has climbed to 597 days, up from 504 days in the organization’s 2019 survey.
Across the EU, just 28% of those innovative medicines were “fully available” as of January, meaning national health insurance systems covered them for any patients with valid prescriptions. That’s down from 42% in 2019. Another 17% were available only under restricted conditions, while nearly half — 49% — were still not covered at all.
And European cancer patients face longer delays than patients with any other type of disease.
By contrast, American cancer patients enjoy almost immediate access to new medicines. Once the Food and Drug Administration approves a drug, public insurance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid cover it virtually immediately. And most private insurers do so too.
Patients should not have to wait nearly two years for access to lifesaving drugs. And yet, all too often, they do — because European health systems use these delays as a pressure tactic to compel biotech companies to offer steep price discounts.
Members of both parties have recently proposed capping the U.S. price of medicines at the lower prices paid in other developed countries.
They mean well — they want to make drugs more affordable. But they often don’t realize that European nations pay lower prices due to rationing tactics and other artificial price controls.
Importing those tactics here would deter companies from pursuing medical research, which is extraordinarily expensive and risky. Developing a new drug costs more than $2 billion, on average — largely due to the sky-high failure rate. Only about 5% of experimental cancer drugs that enter clinical trials ultimately win regulatory approval.
The Congressional Budget Office has concluded that tying U.S. drug prices to the much lower prices paid in Europe would dampen pharmaceutical research and development more than any other pricing approach it examined.
For the colon cancer patients I represent, that is not an accounting exercise. The drugs that exist today were only discovered because scientists had the funding to pursue risky, improbable research years ago. Patients diagnosed five or 10 years from now will depend on drugs in the development pipeline today — and that pipeline could run dry if America adopts European pricing.
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Our leaders can and should find ways to make medicines more affordable, of course. In particular, they can focus on insurance reforms that lower patients’ out-of-pocket costs, so that Americans facing cancer or other serious diagnoses don’t face a financial crisis at the same time they’re dealing with a medical one.
But European patients are quite literally dying due to a lack of access to new therapies. For American policymakers, those wait times ought to serve as a warning, not an example to emulate.
Nicole Sheahan is the president of the Global Colon Cancer Association.