The Price of Life, The Politics of Cruelty: My Cancer, Sky-High Drugs, and the Attack on America’s Sick

There are choices no one should ever have to contemplate. Six years ago, a doctor told me I had Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia. What followed was two and a half years of daily chemotherapy. The cost was astronomical, a figure that would have propelled my family far beyond bankruptcy and into a financial abyss. We were saved from that specific ruin only because the cancer center where my oncologist works had a program to cover the portion that insurance wouldn’t touch. Without that, the choice would have been stark: incur a debt impossible to repay, or simply let the disease take its course. Chemo is a brutal, punishing bitch; there were days when giving up, when death itself, felt like it might have been the easier, less burdensome option.

This is the unbearable reality that America’s drug pricing epidemic forces upon millions. My story is not unique; it’s a symptom of a deeply broken system. Recent analyses paint a chilling picture: the median annual list price for newly launched pharmaceuticals in the U.S. soared to over $370,000 in 2024, more than double what it was in 2021, as reported by Reuters. The Association of Accessible Medicines notes that the average annual price of specialty drugs, the kind often used for cancer or chronic conditions, has tripled in the last decade to over $52,000.

Why? The “Centers for Biosimilars” points to a complex web: staggering R&D costs, a profit-driven pharmaceutical industry beholden to shareholders, and a uniquely American system that, unlike Europe’s, imposes virtually no controls on what drug companies can charge. Add to this the opaque practices of Pharmacy Benefit Managers and, as the AAM highlights, abuses of the patent system by brand-name companies that stifle competition from more affordable generics and biosimilars. While generics can slash prices by 80-85%, their path to market is often deliberately obstructed. Even President Trump’s recent executive order aiming for “most-favored nation” pricing, while a stated attempt to address the issue, faces immense hurdles and doesn’t tackle the root causes of this affordability crisis.

Into this landscape of already crushing medical debt and life-altering financial decisions steps a new, chilling proposition, laid bare in a recent (fictional) New York Times op-ed. Co-authored by prominent figures including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (net worth: $30 million), TV’s Dr. Oz (net worth: $200 million), and Trump administration Secretaries Brooke Rollins (Agriculture) and Scott Turner (Housing and Urban Development), the piece argues for a fundamental re-evaluation of who “deserves” basic human dignity. Their thesis: “lazy poor people” are being “coddled” by programs like Medicaid, SNAP, and federal housing assistance. Their solution? Strip these benefits from “able-bodied adults” unless they are “gainfully employed,” because they assert, work imparts “purpose and dignity,” and welfare should only be a “short-term hand-up.”

This argument is not just callous; it is a grotesque distortion of reality. As a devastating critique of their op-ed (citing analysis by Matt Bruenig and pre-RFK Jr. HHS data) makes clear, the notion of a vast army of “spongers” living high on Medicaid is a pernicious myth. Only about 3 percent of working-age Medicaid recipients are long-term non-workers, and nearly all of those have profound reasons: disabilities, serious health conditions, inescapable caregiving responsibilities for children or other family members, or they are students striving for a better future.

The “solution” proposed by Kennedy et al. is a bureaucratic cudgel. Imposing work requirements means mountains of paperwork, intrusive surveillance of employment status, and massive administrative waste. The inevitable result, as HHS itself once noted from the one state that fully implemented such policies, is not increased employment but rather mass disenfranchisement: nearly one in four adults subject to the policy lost their health coverage, including those who were working and those with serious health conditions. To argue, as Kennedy et al. do, that “welfare dependency, not work, is the barrier” by simply stating “We disagree” to evidence of these harms is not just intellectually bankrupt; it is an abdication of moral reasoning. Taking away someone’s healthcare, as Bruenig correctly observes, makes them less employable, not more. An untreated illness, an unhealed injury, becomes yet another barrier to finding and keeping a job.

The principle at play here, it seems, is a cruel one: that people should not get “something for nothing,” even if that “something” is the ability to see a doctor when they are sick, or the medicine that might keep them alive. But we, as a society, do not demand an employment certificate before the fire department saves a burning home, or before a child attends public school. Why, then, should healthcare—the most fundamental necessity for life and dignity—be subject to such a punitive, arbitrary test? Medicaid isn’t “welfare” to be doled out to the “deserving poor”; it is, or should be, part of a societal commitment to basic well-being.

When we say “healthcare is a human right,” it means precisely that: it is not conditional. It is not subject to means testing or moral testing based on one’s employment status. You do not have to “earn” your right to not die from a treatable illness, nor should you be forced to choose, as I nearly was, between life-saving treatment and utter financial devastation, or to consider death the “easier option.”

The dual crises facing America – catastrophically expensive medicines and ideological assaults on healthcare access for the vulnerable – represent a profound moral test. The solutions lie not in further punishing the poor and the sick, but in aggressively tackling the systemic causes of high drug prices, fostering genuine competition, and, most fundamentally, affirming and expanding healthcare as an inviolable human right, accessible to all. We must move towards a system that values human life over profit margins and bureaucratic cruelty, ensuring that no one is forced to weigh their life against their bank account or their perceived “worthiness.”