Medicare pays for $93,000 Drug That Extends life 4 Months?

Medicare will now pay for a prostate cancer drug called Provenge that costs $93,000 and only promises to extend life for 4 months?

What's wrong with this picture?

According to the linked article, "Medicare is legally prohibited from considering price when deciding whether to pay for a new treatment." If I were CEO of a pharmaceutical company, I would see this rule as a license to print money, as I'm sure the forward thinking folks at Dendreon Corp., the company that makes Provenge, obviously did. They estimate $1 billion in sales next year alone!

Question: Is death so frightening that a person would spend $93,000 to stave it off just 4 months?

Answer: If it's someone else's money, definitely yes. Otherwise, one would have to think about it.

Perhaps this prescription should come with a questionnaire of its own: If you had the money to pay for Provenge, would you buy it or leave that money to your spouse and children? But this Hobson's choice would only penalize loving husbands.

Perhaps a macabre edition of "Deal or No Deal" would save the government a lot of money (half a billion dollars next year, to be exact). Howie Mandel could offer patients $46,500 to spend in any way they choose if they tell their doctors not to give them Provenge. We could call the show "Provenge or Final Binge."

If you see your physical form as all there is and death as the great enemy, a mentality sold to us by materialists everywhere--and the ad men of the healthcare-government complex in particular--it leads to these kinds of wild scenarios.

And to this kind of crazy profit.

Photo courtesy of floridalowpricehealthcare.com.