Rosacea, a facial skin and/or eye condition, afflicts a growing number of ice people. With rosacea, microbes, a self-hating immune system and your ancestry cause your pasty white face to appear permanently apoplectic. It can be well controlled with a delayed release doxycyline antibiotic called Oracea. But once you get the bill for your monthly Oracea prescription, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and vicious feedback loop.

8 Signs You Have Rosacea

You know you have rosacea when:

  1. You disappear in front of the tomato bin at the store.
  2. Beautiful women stare at you (like you're Jack the Ripper).
  3. Strangers make friendly overtures by asking, "What happened to your face?"
  4. Children and small pets back away, whimpering.
  5. Your dogsled team breaks records every time.
  6. You shop for makeup in the spackling compound aisle.
  7. You feel like you faceplanted in the volleyball pit with your eyes open.
  8. Your dermatologist prescribes you acne pills and you must rob banks to afford them.

You Can't Get Blood from a Turnip, but You Can from a Beet

As proof, look no further than the price of Oracea.

Galderma Laboratories saw you coming. Who doesn't? By combining an ordinary twenty-dollar rosacea-treating antibiotic with a little common delayed-release technology, they discovered they could charge you over $500 per month — on the discount market — for a tolerably good treatment without the typical side effects.

Big Pharma Can Smell Desperation

Does it have to be that costly? Of course it does. With a fire engine face, you haven't won any beauty pagents or social invitations lately, have you? You don't even want to go to work (unless "work" includes ski masks and terse little notes). So, what self-respecting pharmaceutical company would charge desperate people only enough to cover costs and make, say, a 200 percent profit? Like you, they love a good joke, but really, if they did, it would be so humiliating that the pharmaceutical CEOs would end up looking a lot like you, forcing them to buy Spain for consolation.

Many Fingers in Your Wallet

Besides, a cannon blast of red tape falls from the sky whenever you turn developed but unpatented and affordable drugs into gold. And that gold must be liberally spread among the following if it's going to prevent competitive undercutting:

  1. Congress
  2. FDA
  3. Doctors who won't prescribe without an "incentive"
  4. Chinese drug counterfeiters
  5. PR professionals to circulate horror stories about fake drugs from China and generic products
  6. Insurance companies
  7. Offshore banks

Serenity for the Scarlet-faced

Can you find relief from Oracea price gouging? Certainly. Many other products can calm down an angry face. Different antibiotics and topical creams work for some. Others have success with the gene-altering, liver-shrivelling, one-and-done Accutane treatment. But if nothing else works, you can always try:

  1. Getting face tattoos. They're normal now.
  2. Hanging around emergency rooms until you find a suitable face transplant donor
  3. Marrying someone with a lot of facial scars so you look regular by comparison
  4. Smoking dope until you don't care anymore
  5. Running away with the circus

Most importantly, don't feed the monster. If Big Pharma knows they can fetch idiotically high prices for formerly affordable drugs, the next thing you know, they'll be charging $600 for Epipens and $250,000 per year for cancer drugs. Oh, wait . . . .