It'd be nice if the medical establishment released some data that proved their treatments effective at saving, or even extending lives.  I'll grant that surgical removal of non-metastatic tumors can be a life saving treatment, but few people escape the US cancer treatment industry without being subjected to some other form of highly toxic treatment.  As mentioned in the article many of these treatments have serious, and often life-threatening side effects, and many can even cause cancer themselves.

Sure, Doctors will quote you improving 5-year survival rates until the cows come home, but this is an artifact of earlier detection, not the efficacy of treatment.  They will also point to the fact that overall cancer mortality is falling in the US, but it's hard to point to a single cause, especially when smoking rates are falling along with exposure to environmental carcinogens.

I recognize that there may be some cancers, and some treatments that are highly effective, but overall, on average, cancer treatment in the US is a hugely expensive endeavor which has never been proven to save or extend lives.

"should accumulated wealth really be what defines the length of a person's life"

Yes. There are always tradeoffs, and the reality is not everyone can have the latest, most expensive treatments. All of us place a different value on our own lives. Some of us smoke, some of us hang glide, most of us spend money on cable TV and hookers that we could just as well spend on supplemental health insurance, because we prefer to enjoy ourselves now rather than go without in order to have our lives extended 6 months when were old.

This is a very serious issue.  I think that we would all like to think that human life is so valuable that no dollar amount can be placed upon it, particularly since that is our own subjective experience; every individual normally feels (barring some abnormal depression) that his or her own life is absolutely essential and cannot be given up for any reason.  Human evolution has endowed us with those feelings.  But in practical terms, there is only so much money that a given individual can spend, and there is also only so much money that any given nation can spend for the purpose of helping out individuals who otherwise could not afford medical care that they need.  On a global basis we could also note that the resources of the world are finite, while the demands of the human population are ever-increasing (due both to growing population, and also to the demand for higher standards of living).  At some point it becomes a problem just to keep everybody fed, much less to give everybody the medical care that they need.  

Like many of the dire problems which the world is facing in the 21st century, this one does not have any easy solution.  But certainly, global population control is a good place to start.