At What Price Stewardship?

Learning to be good stewards will take education, new tools, and practice. I suggest starting with low-hanging fruit. The Food and Drug Administration and Medicare have recently decided to approve a novel, individually tailored immunotherapy for prostate cancer that adds, on average, 4 months of life to an elderly patient at the price of $93,000. Perhaps it is an example of Lewis Thomas’s halfway technology. But as low-hanging fruit goes, that looks like a watermelon.

Dr. Kevin Powell is associate professor of pediatrics at St. Louis University and a pediatric hospitalist at SSM Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical Center in St. Louis.