A wave of new treatments have cured devastating diseases. When the costs are too much, even for the insured, patients hunt for other ways to pay.April Crawford never thought she’d be begging for help on GoFundMe, but she has run out of options. She has multiple sclerosis, and Mavenclad, the drug that could slow her decline, has a list price of $194,000 a year. Her Medicare insurance will pay for most of it, but she has a co-pay of $10,000.Ms. Crawford, 47, doesn’t have $10,000 and has no way to get it. A law signed last year will put a $2,000 annual limit on out-of-pocket costs for Medicare patients like her — but not until 2025. Even at that price, money is tight in her household. She and her husband, who is disabled with COPD, live in Oliver Springs, Tenn., with a nephew who was disabled by a traumatic brain injury. All three of them rely on federal disability payments.So she posted an appeal on GoFundMe in August. At the time this article was published, she had raised $20.Ms. Crawford has come face to face with a persistent dilemma in medical care. Advances in science and immense investments by the federal government and drug companies have completely altered prospects for people with conditions that seemed untreatable in almost every area of medicine — cancers, allergies, skin diseases, genetic afflictions, neurological disorders, obesity.“This is the golden age of drug discovery,” said Dr. Daniel Skovronsky, chief scientific and medical officer of Eli Lilly and Company, which has new treatments for obesity, mantle cell lymphoma and Alzheimer’s.Prices reflect the inherently costly and fundamentally different way drugs are developed and tested today. But, he said, the burden on patients who cannot afford life changing new drugs weighs heavily on him and others who work for drug companies.For many people using private insurance, innovative medicines are dangling just out of reach. Even when Medicare’s 2025 cap comes into play — or the $9,100 cap that already existed for those receiving insurance under the Affordable Care Act — many will still find drugs unaffordable. Research suggests large numbers of patients abandon their prescriptions when faced with $2,000 in payments.One telltale sign that a treatment is working, experts say, is a widening chasm in outcomes between wealthy patients and everyone else. This is in part because when the prices for miracle drugs reach hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, many people do not fill prescriptions simply because they cannot afford them.Underlying the data that quantify these problems are individual stories about patients, like Ms. Crawford, who have tried desperately to find a way to pay for expensive drugs that could make a big difference in their lives. A few have succeeded, often briefly and tenuously, while many others do not. And those experiences produce consequences — cures only for a select few.Costly CuresThe new era in treating previously intractable diseases began with huge scientific leaps after the turn of the century, allowing researchers to find genes they could target to treat cancers and other diseases. Scientists could harness the immune system or suppress it and even alter patients’ very DNA with gene therapy.“Today’s drugs are more effective because they target the biology of disease ,” said Dr. Skovronsky of Eli Lilly, with few side effects.He called previous drugs to treat diseases like psoriasis or rheumatoid arthritis “blunt instruments” that shut down the immune system but had serious side effects.“Yesterday’s drugs were moderately effective in treating a broader population,” he added.But the drugs that have emerged often are extremely expensive to produce. At Lilly, Dr. Skovronsky said, the company will be spending more than $8 billion in 2023 on drug research and development.New Developments in Cancer ResearchCard 1 of 5Progress in the field.