This is In Conversation from Apple News. I'm Shemitabasu. Today, why a 25-cent pill is being sold to cancer patients for hundreds of dollars. In early 2023, journalist David Armstrong started feeling pains in his abdomen.

At first, he dismissed them as muscle cramps, and he tried to ignore them for a few weeks, but they kept getting worse.

And then one February morning, things took a turn.

I woke up and I literally couldn't get out of bed. They were just excruciating. I had to grip the wall to stand up.

So David went to the ER and scans showed holes and weakened spots in David's bone.

Areas where tissue had been destroyed.

Pretty much from there, they knew that I had multiple myeloma, which is a blood cancer.

There was some more test to confirm it.

But that's the day I found out that I had this particular cancer.

David was shaken.

Multiple myeloma is a rare, incurable blood cancer.

Decades ago, the prognosis was grim.

The life expectancy of a newly diagnosed patient

was three to five years. But David learned about a medication that could help, a drug called

Revlimid. It costs just 25 cents to make one pill, but it's sold to cancer patients like David

for nearly $1,000. I mean, I just thought that couldn't be.

The sheer difference between the cost of the pill to make

and the cost that my health plan was paying just really startled me.

David has been a health care reporter for years,

and in a recent piece for ProPublica, he takes a deep dive

into why Rev Limit and other prescription drugs cost so much in the U.S., despite relatively

low manufacturing costs. I sat down with David to hear about his quest to learn the reason for

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