Understanding the explosion of
health care cost isn’t rocket science. It is actually a trivial warm-up
exercise for the mind: as we eliminated, at least statistically speaking, a
growing number of once significant causes of death, more people reach an age
where they become more cancer-prone because their genetic coding turns less
stable, their immune system deteriorates, and mutations following from many
causes are less manageable. Malignant
neoplasms, also known as cancers, are the result. Although they account for
only about
13% of overall causes of death and likelihood of cancer deaths does not
increase with longevity – on the contrary, it declines significantly from a tipping point of
roughly 55 years of age – those afflicted today not only stand better
chances of successful therapeutic intervention but also are less likely to die
of other causes, clearing the way for longer survival rates at significantly
higher cost.
As the duration of our ability to
control malignant tumor cells increases with the advent of various
pharmaceutical and other therapeutic approaches, there is still no cure in
sight and cancer has remained a highly complex systemic disease requiring
multiple complex balancing acts.
These balancing acts quite often
are to be taken more literally than society would like. A small group of specialty
pharmaceuticals accounts for roughly 25
percent of all drug-related spending. A cancer patient in need of a few
targeted therapies can quickly run up a monthly tab in the five digits.In 2007, the overall costs of cancer — including treatment
and indirect mortality expenses (such as lost productivity in the workplace) —
was estimated to be $226.8
billion. Pressure is likely to increase and will demand answers to
questions society has long shirked as unethical – or, more to the point,
politically inconvenient to almost everyone: What price human
life? Who is to decide? And how to allocate the expense?