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by thelibrarian 219 days ago
Considering the James Van Der Beek of Dawson's Creek fame is having to hold a fundraising auction of his memorabilia to fund his cancer treatment, cancer is expensive in the US.
2 comments

How'd the theme song to that show go again?
Cancer is expensive everywhere, the difference is who pays for it.
actually a difference is also how many players along the supply chain siphon money out of the process. the more greed is allowed and acted on for the treatment, the more expensive it gets. introduce layers of insurances, hedgefonds, pension funds, lobbyism, ... it adds up to riddiculous amounts far beyond the original R&D/infrastructure/treatment costs.
And those are just the downsides of a market-based system. There are also upsides of single-payer systems, like monopsony buying power.
And also downsides, e.g. many treatments just aren't available, and many others would never have had their discovery funded without the market-based system existing.
Governments can (and do) directly fund medical research including drug discovery. This is in part because governments of even just middling competence have an incentive to keep their workforce (which also includes their military) healthy.
Nobody is advocating for eliminating a market-based system. My country (Australia) has both single-payer and a market-based private healthcare system.
You can imagine how that system, like most, is actually getting its medical advancements from the US.
It's a lot more expensive in the US. Three years of ribociclib is US$100k here in Argentina, which dwarfs the usual costs of things like chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and surgical resection. (All of which is normally paid for either by a health plan or by the public hospital system.) In the US, if you have to go through all of that, I think the cost is going to be at least an order of magnitude higher.
This is either intentional bad faith trolling or you are not aware of the per capita spending on healthcare in the US.

https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...

You don't think cancer is an expensive disease to treat? You don't think it involves a lot of inputs?