Last week, an upbeat story
  in the New York Times described how big pharmaceutical companies have discovered
  cancer. A few years ago, the article points out, companies like Pfizer, Glaxo
  and Wyeth had relatively little interest in what they saw as a "niche market."

While a great many people die of cancer, the disease takes so many different
  forms that each market is relatively small. Big Pharma generally would rather
  focus its research on diseases with a broad base-allergy medications, for example,
  are a big favorite (even if, according to the National
  Institute for Health Care Management, most people taking allergy medications
  don’t actually suffer from allergies.)

Drugmakers also prefer drugs that customers can be counted on to take for many
  years. (There is a saying in the pharmaceutical industry: "A pill that
  cures is good. A pill that you take every day is better.") Cancer patients
  tend to "die within months," the Times pointed out, curtailing profits.

But recently, big drug-makers have begun to recognize that cancer drugs can
  be profitable-if the price is high enough:

". . . companies have discovered that some patients will tolerate prices
  of tens of thousands of dollars a year, " the Times observed, "making
  drugs for even rare cancers into big moneymakers. Gleevec, which is used primarily
  for two obscure cancers – chronic myelogenous leukemia and gastrointestinal
  stromal tumor – had sales last year of $2.2 billion."

The race to get on the cancer bandwagon could lead to a flood of "me too"
  drugs that duplicate each other, the article acknowledged. But from the standpoint
  of the patients there [are] never too many, cancer drugs, the article asserted,
  quoting Dr. Robert J. Motzer, a kidney cancer specialist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering
  Cancer Center in New York City.  After all, the more drugs there are in the
  pipeline, the better chance a patient has of finding one, or a combination,
  that will work for them. Besides "competition could . . . bring down prices,"
  the Times suggested.

Really? If so, that would be a first.

When it comes to healthcare, competition almost never leads to lower prices.
  In most markets, comparison shoppers reward quality at a lower price. But when
  you’re dying of cancer, you’re probably not hunting for a bargain-even if you’re
  paying 20% of the cost out of your own pocket.

More importantly, even if you wanted to compare cost and quality, how would
  you go about doing it? As anyone who has ever been seriously ill knows, the
  more you learn about the pros and cons of various treatments, the less certain
  you are likely to be as to which might be the best for you.

Ambiguity haunts medical care. In my newest book, (Money-Driven
  Medicine: The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much Harper/Collins, May
  2006 )," I quote Dr. Atul Gawande, who describes "uncertainty"
  as "the core predicament of medicine . . . the thing that makes being a
  patient so wrenching, being a doctor so difficult and being part of a society
  that pays the bills so wrenching."

A Boston surgeon and author of Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes On An Imperfect
  Science, Gawande is quick to admit that even the physician is often not at all
  sure as to the "best" treatment for a given condition. Little wonder
  that patients are not able to bring down prices by shrewdly picking the product
  that offers the best value.

As for the idea that when there are more drugs in the marketplace, patients
  stand a better chance of finding one that works, some physicians warn that too
  many new drugs only adds to the confusion in a marketplace where free market
  competition has turned into a free-for-all.

According to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association, some
  400 cancer drugs from 178 companies are now in clinical trials-and many oncologists
  complain that this is more cures than they can hope to keep track of.

A sign of the times: in 2004 the
  Times reported that one session of the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s
  conference was titled "Therapy of Metastatic Colorectcal Cancer: What Do
  We Do with So Many Options?"

As each drug company races to fill its own pipeline, a fragmented industry
  spawns a dizzying array of half-way cures. Too many drugs shrink tumors-but
  don’t bring any mortality benefit. Meanwhile, too much competition and too little
  collaboration makes it difficult for oncologists to sort out which drugs are
  most effective alone, which should be used together-and in what sequence.

When I was writing Money-Driven Medicine Dr. Genie Kleinerman, chief of pediatrics
  at Houston’s M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, recalled how two companies refused
  to work together to help her prove that two of their drugs might do a better
  job of targeting malignant cells of osteosarcoma ( a bone cancer that occurs
  in children), if they were used in combination. In the lab, Kleinerman had shown
  that you could mix the two agents. Now, she needed the company to do clinical
  trials in order to win approval from the FDA.

"But the lawyers for the two companies couldn’t come up with an agreement
  on who would own the rights to the combination and who would pay for what,"
  Kleinerman recalled, still frustrated. "Today it would be the same situation
  -or probably worse. The pharmaceutical industry has become so protective of
  who owns the intellectual property. You probably couldn’t even get them to sit
  down at the same table."

Instead, companies pursuing parallel research squander millions producing tumor-shrinking
  drugs that, too often, offer "no
  improved survival, no better quality of life, no added safety" according
  to one study in the British Medical Journal–though they almost always cost
  more.

And as the pharmaceutical industry’s big guns elbow their way into the cancer
  marketplace, peddling pills that cost tens of thousands for a course of treatment,
  they are gobbling up much-needed health care dollars. Paying for these drugs
  is straining the system. Two years ago, Bains & Company, a management consulting
  firm estimated
  that paying for all of the drugs in development would require $60 billion a
  year-up from $10 billion at the time.

"Who’s going to pay for that? It’s just going to become unaffordable,"
  said Elgar Peerschke, head of the North American health care practice at Bain.

Oncologists like Genie Kleinerman believe that if government gave drugmakers
  incentives to pool their research, they might be able to develop fewer, more
  effective and more affordable remedies at a lower cost. But that’s not how free
  market competition normally works-at least not according to the conventional
  wisdom of a market-driven health care system.