It focuses on how pharmaceutical companies are gouging cancer patients with attrociously priced medicine, literally making people choose between Life and Debt. Although only Cancer is covered in the article it's safe to assume the story applies to all issues regarding medicine.

But Diekmeyer had another, more immediate, fear keeping her up nights. Because of mounting medical bills, she was worried she might lose her home. Already, Diekmeyer owed her oncologist more than $10,000, debt that had escalated since May 2005, when she started taking Herceptin, a cutting-edge cancer formula. Produced by Genentech, a leading manufacturer of biotech drugs in South San Francisco, California, the new medicine was her best — perhaps her only — hope of beating the disease.

Personally, I've never had five figures in my bank account.

The cost of cancer-fighting drugs went up 27 percent in 2006, compared with less than 2 percent for other drugs, according to the most recent Medco Drug Trend Report. And many of the new medications are being tested in combination, so patients may be faced with not one but two or even three drugs that cost $50,000 each.

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One in 10 cancer patients is unable to cover basics such as food and housing, according to a survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation in Menlo Park, California; more disturbingly, 1 in 12 people with cancer has delayed or decided against treatment because it was too costly.

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Diekmeyer was covered under her husband's health insurance, a plan that had always seemed adequate. Now she watched her co-pays for doctor visits, hospital stays, surgeries and drugs add up. The plan only partially paid for many meds, including Zofran, an antinausea drug that Diekmeyer says cost her $42 a pill. Allotted 12 pills a month by her insurance, she sometimes needed twice that many. "Every time I wanted to stop throwing up I'd think, That's $42 I'm spending," she recalls.

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"Pricing these specialized drugs is partly an ethical issue, but it's predominately about economics," says Eric M. Meslin, Ph.D., director of the Indiana University Center for Bioethics in Indianapolis. "Drug development costs money, and drug pricing has to recoup those costs, plus turn a profit for shareholders."

Now comes the part that pisses me off the most.

In 2005, after Genentech announced success in using the colorectal cancer drug Avastin to treat breast and lung cancer, the company also said these patients would need twice the dose — doubling the price tag to $100,000 per year. After an uproar, the company last fall capped Avastin charges for lung and colorectal cancer at $55,000 and said it would apply the same cap to breast cancer patients when the FDA officially approves it for that use.

These meds cost a lot because patients are willing to pay a lot for something that works so well. Genentech raised the price of Tarceva, a lung cancer pill, by 30 percent because "it was a more powerful and more active agent" than originally understood, and "so more valuable," an executive told The New York Times last year.