"We Developed [the Medication] for Western Patients Who Can Afford It," Marijn Dekkers, CEO, Bayer

Well here's a bit of cheery (warning: sarcasm) news: apparently, oral cancer drugs prescribed today cost six times what similar (or even the exact same) drugs cost fifteen years ago. In other words, a treatment that would've cost, on average, $1,869 in 2000 cost $11,325 in 2014.

Inflation, you say. Well, obviously, but a quick bit of math shows the annual inflation rate necessary to get from $1,869 to $11,325 in fifteen years is just over 13.7%. As they say in the funny papers, nice work if you can get it. A quick bit of Googling tells me the average US inflation rate over that same period was just 2.2%. Wage changes are harder to calculate given the numbers vary significantly depending on your income bracket -- big surprise: the higher the bracket, the better the annual rate of increase -- but for most people it's probably unlikely that their wages increased by 14% a year. 

So covering a 13.8% annual increase in your cancer drugs is a relatively big ask. 

But don't order yet. There's more. As the article points out, not only has the retail price of these drugs skyrocketed, but insurance plans -- not mine, thank god, at least not yet -- are increasingly asking for patients to bear more of the cost for such treatments. Particularly challenging are those plans that require the patient to bear a percentage of the drug's cost, rather than paying a flat co-pay. 

But there's still one more factor to consider: despite all the PR, how many cures for cancer have you seen emerge in the past fifteen years? Compare that to the number of new oral treatments, allowing you to "treat your cancer the way we treat diabetes," that have emerged. So now, to the extent cancer's like a (very expensive) form of diabetes, cancer patients basically get to pay some twelve grand a month to stay alive. (Retail price on Type I diabetes care is probably somewhere in the realm of $500-$1,000 a month.) 

So it's a win-win for everybody -- well, except for the patients without awesome health insurance and/or without ten grand a month to spare. And really, who has that kind of money just sitting around? Well, aside from drug company executives.

Ultimately, I think one has to wonder how wise a strategy the drug companies' approach is. With a 13.8% inflation rate, it won't take long before the number of Western patients who can afford these medications diminishes beyond the point where the population can support the industry. 

And then, of course, there's the bodies. People tend to react negatively to bodies, especially when it wasn't really necessary for them to become bodies save for the cost demanded to keep them humming along as people. At some point, you'd think the pitchforks would have to come out.