New Alzheimer drug

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently approved use of a new drug -- Aduhelm or aducanumab developed by Biogen -- for treating Alzheimer’s disease. 

Three medical experts on an FDA advisory panel resigned from the panel after deciding the drug's effectiveness has not been sufficiently shown or that the drug will do more harm than good. Link.

The financial effect of the approval on Medicare and Medicare Advantage programs and beneficiaries will be huge. Only time will tell how huge. Medicare’s long-standing practice is to make coverage determinations without taking cost into consideration.  This article from the Kaiser Foundation puts an expected price tag on the drug of $56,000 per patient per year. Since the drug will be physician-administered, it will be covered by Medicare Part B, for which Medicare covers 80% of the cost and the patient 20% (up to the annual out-of-pocket maximum of $7,550 for in-network care and $11,300 for combined in-network and out-of-network care in 2021).

"[T]he drug’s approval could trigger hundreds of billions of dollars of new government spending, all without a vote in Congress or indeed any public debate over the drug’s value." "If even one-third of the estimated 6 million people with Alzheimer’s in the United States receives the new treatment, health-care spending could swell by $112 billion annually." (The Atlantic).

Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are sacred cows to politicians and more than half of federal government spending.