First point: Get used to this. Moderately-priced mass-market drugs will disappear. Or rather, they will go off-patent and become generics. With no R&D expenses

First point: Get used to this. Moderately-priced mass-market drugs will disappear. Or rather, they will go off-patent and become generics. With no R&D expenses to recoup, they will become cheap commodities, costing a few dozen or hundred dollars per treatment. New drugs, especially those protected from competition by the Orphan Drug Act, will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. Don’t be surprised when the first million-dollar treatment hits the market. Which dovetails with: These developments are no kind of tragedy — drugs cannot do much more to lengthen human lifespan. Nor are these developments the result of a conspiracy or of unusual levels of greed. They are just the end-stage of the depletion of a resource. We are specifically talking about life extension, and the claim is that the modern pharmacopoeia is moving away from traditional drugs, to far more expensive alternatives with more therapeutic potential.