Survival of the self-appointedly fittest

I found myself reading an article this morning about new cancer drugs and how pharmaceutical companies are pricing a year's worth in the tens of thousands of dollars, even with insurance–effectively pricing out many patients drawing salaries under six figures.

Until now, drug makers have typically defended high prices by noting the cost of developing new medicines. But executives at Genentech and its majority owner, Roche, are now using a separate argument – citing the inherent value of life-sustaining therapies.

If society wants the benefits, they say, it must be ready to spend more for treatments like Avastin and another of the company's cancer drugs, Herceptin, which sells for $40,000 a year.

Well, if the high costs of drugs are now being justified in terms of "life-sustaining" value, why not start custom pricing them based on the value of each particular life they're attempting to sustain?

Instead of trying to use "ownership" to thin out the lazy undesirables by getting them to rightly conclude that trying to survive cancer just isn't a smart use of their health care (and food, and housing and everything else) dollars, this could be the basis for reworking the entire flagging health care system:

The more your life is worth, in terms of financial assets and what I'll call "Whitey capital," meaning you exemplify more of the values held in esteem by the relevant leadership and vocal popular opinion, the more you should pay for its healthy continuance.

If you're white, wealthy, part of a (preferably churchgoing) family and possessed of the preferred reproductive anatomy, you should quite simply be honored and overjoyed to be given the opportunity to invest more in your continued, superior existence.