By Michael Snyder

If you are an American, there is a 1 in 3 chance that you will get cancer during your lifetime. If you are a man, the odds are closer to 1 in 2. And almost everyone in America either knows someone who currently has cancer or who has already died from cancer. But it wasn’t always this way.

Back in the 1940s, only one out of every sixteen Americans would develop cancer. Something has happened that has caused the cancer rate in this nation to absolutely explode, and it is being projected that cancer will soon surpass heart disease and become the leading cause of death in the United States.

Overall, the World Health Organization says that approximately 14 million new cases of cancer are diagnosed around the globe each year, and the number of new cases is expected to increase by about 70 percent over the next 2 decades. There are very few words in the English language that cause more fear than the word “cancer,” but despite billions spent on research and all of the technological progress we have made over the years this plague just continues to spiral wildly out of control. Why is that?

In America today, more money is spent to treat cancer than to treat any other disease by far. In fact, according to NBC News, 100 BILLION dollars was spent on cancer drugs just last year alone…

As drug prices continue to fall under ever-increasing scrutiny, spending on cancer medicines has hit a new milestone: $100 billion in 2014.

That’s up more than 10 percent from 2013, and up from $75 billion five years earlier, according to a report published Tuesday from the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics.

100 million dollars would be an astounding amount of money to spend on these drugs. But 100 billion dollars is 1,000 times as much money as 100 million dollars. And the IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics is projecting that the amount of money spent on cancer drugs will continue to grow at a rate of 6 to 8 percent a year.

Needless to say, there are a lot of people out there that are becoming exceedingly wealthy treating this disease.

And the cost of some these drugs is absolutely absurd. According to NBC News, two of the latest cancer drugs to be developed “are priced at $12,500 a month“…

Forty-five new drugs for cancer hit the market between 2010 and 2014, including 10 last year alone, IMS said. Two of those are so-called immunotherapies, a hot new class that harnesses the immune system to fight cancer. They are Opdivo from Bristol-Myers Squibb and Keytruda from Merck. Both are priced at $12,500 a month.

Yes, I understand that drug companies are in business to make a profit.

But how can anyone possibly justify charging cancer patients that much for their medicine?

If you are diagnosed with cancer in America today and you choose to trust the medical system with your treatment, you can say goodbye to your financial future. Even if you have health insurance, you will probably end up flat broke one way or the other. Either you will survive and be flat broke, or you will die flat broke.

And despite all of our ultra-expensive treatments, the survival rate for cancer is still not very good. At this point, the five-year survival rate for those diagnosed with cancer is just 65 percent. That means that 35 percent of those diagnosed with cancer are going to end up dead within five years, and for certain forms of cancer that percentage is much, much higher.

Sadly, as I mentioned at the top of this article, the percentage of the population getting cancer just continues to go up…

We have lost the war on cancer. At the beginning of the last century, one person in twenty would get cancer. In the 1940s it was one out of every sixteen people. In the 1970s it was one person out of ten. Today one person out of three gets cancer in the course of their life.

We live in a society that is highly toxic, and it is getting worse with each passing day.

And once you do develop cancer, doctors are not allowed to prescribe any “alternative treatments” for you. They are only permitted to offer you the treatments that the system tells them that they must offer.

One of these is chemotherapy. It is an absolutely nightmarish treatment that often kills the patient before it kills the cancer. The following is how one woman described her experience with chemo…

This highly toxic fluid was being injected into my veins. The nurse administering it was wearing protective gloves because it would burn her skin if just a tiny drip came into contact with it. I couldn’t help asking myself “If such precautions are needed to be taken on the outside, what is it doing to me on the inside?” From 7 pm that evening, I vomited solidly for two and a half days. During my treatment, I lost my hair by the handful, I lost my appetite, my skin colour, my zest for life. I was death on legs.

Many patients go through round after hellish round, hoping that it will do something about their cancer. Have you ever known someone who has gone through this ordeal? It can be absolutely heartbreaking.

But in the end, there is a tremendous amount of doubt regarding whether chemo does much good at all. Just consider the words of Dr. Ralph Moss, the author of a book entitled The Cancer Industry…

In the end, there is no proof that chemotherapy actually extends life in the vast majority of cases, and this is the great lie about chemotherapy, that somehow there is a correlation between shrinking a tumour and extending the life of a patient.

So why do oncologists push chemo so hard?

Well, it is because they make a tremendous amount of money doing it…

According to the research of Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics fame, “Oncologists are some of the highest paid doctors, their average income is increasing faster than any other specialist in the medical field, and more than half their income comes from selling and administering chemotherapy.”

Yes you read that right. Oncologists make a huge profit, as much as two-thirds of their income in some cases, from chemotherapy drugs.

Their business model is very different from other doctors because you can’t buy chemotherapy drugs at your local pharmacy.

Oncologists buy these drugs direct at wholesale prices, then they mark them up and bill the insurance companies. This legal profiting on drugs by doctors is unique to the cancer treatment world. They’re making money off the drugs that they insist you take to save your life. That’s a HUGE conflict of interest. They’re selling you the drugs, and charging you for the privilege of putting them in your body. No other doctor can do that.

Our system is deeply corrupt and deeply broken.

But nothing is going to change any time soon because hundreds of billions of dollars are being made.

So what do you think? Do you have an experience with the cancer industry that you would like to share? Please feel free to add to the discussion by posting a comment below…

This article first appeared here at the American Dream. Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream and Economic Collapse Blog. Follow him on Twitter here.