BREAKING NEWS! HEALTH CARE IS PROHIBITIVELY EXPENSIVE FOR SOME PEOPLE!

This is actually a significant article, and I'm glad it's on page one of The New York Times today:

Health insurance companies are rapidly adopting a new pricing system for very expensive drugs, asking patients to pay hundreds and even thousands of dollars for prescriptions for medications that may save their lives or slow the progress of serious diseases.

With the new pricing system, insurers abandoned the traditional arrangement that has patients pay a fixed amount, like $10, $20 or $30 for a prescription, no matter what the drug's actual cost. Instead, they are charging patients a percentage of the cost of certain high-priced drugs, usually 20 to 33 percent, which can amount to thousands of dollars a month.

But I really don't like the sentence that follows:

The system means that the burden of expensive health care can now affect insured people, too.

Uh, "now"? What do you mean "now"? This has been a problem for a while.

The article, by Gina Kolata, tells us this started in the Medicare prescription drug program:

The system, often called Tier 4, began in earnest with Medicare drug plans and spread rapidly. It is now incorporated into 86 percent of those plans....

Now Tier 4 is also showing up in insurance that people buy on their own or acquire through employers....

But we were told in 2005 that half of personal bankruptcies were traceable to high medical bills -- and that the majority of those bankruptcy filers had medical insurance. (The Medicare prescription drug plan didn't begin until 2006.)

So this isn't the first huge hole in the insurance safety net -- it's just one more huge hole.

What are we talking about? An MS drug that now costs the patient $3,900 a year out of pocket, up from $240. A leukemia drug that now costs the patient $16,000 a year. A cancer drug that costs $3480 for what might be a 21-day supply.

This is with insurance -- or maybe I should say this is with "insurance."