How are we going to lower the cost of healthcare in this country?

From Merrill Goozner at The Fiscal Times, (emphasis mine):

Can Medicare afford the next generation of marginally effective cancer drugs, whose price tags are approaching $100,000 a year?

That issue wasn’t on the agenda last week when an outside advisory panel told the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services that the medical evidence was strong enough to justify the agency paying for the prostate cancer drug Provenge. But it was clearly on the advisers’ minds since paying for men eligible for the drug could wind up costing the agency $2 billion a year.

Several commented near the end of the meeting that Medicare should begin measuring how well the $93,000 immune system enhancer treatment actually works – just in case its real world efficacy is less than what has been proven so far through clinical trials run by the manufacturer. The evidence submitted to Food and Drug Administration by Seattle-based Dendreon Corp. showed sipuleucel-T (that is Provenge’s generic name) extended the average lifespan of people with metastatic prostate cancer, which is currently about two years, by an average of four months.