Advice on how to straighten out a crappy ISP

[Gary W. Swearingen]

> Unfortunately, this may cost more money than buying a static IP address
> for yourself.

Someone please explain the above statement made to a guy on cable.  I
shut down my server after switching to cable (Internet AND phone, after
Qwest hosed me several times too often), since I thought that static IP
was out of the question on cable.  (The cable contract even forbade
dynamic DNS, IIRC.)  Do some cable systems offer static IP or is there
some other means to get static IP via cable which I don't know about?