There are few things in life more terrifying than a diagnosis of cancer – as any victim to this horrible disease will tell you.
So let’s kill cancer before it kills us.
What if we adopted an Operation Warp Speed for Cancer and made it a national commitment to treat and even eradicate this leading cause of early death in America? This crusade could be similar in size and scope to our national commitment in the 1950s to developing a vaccine against polio and more recently the vaccine for Covid, both of which saved millions of lives.
We know this is not an impossible dream. Over the past four decades, we’ve made stunning progress in cutting death rates from many forms of cancer in half. But there is still a long way to go, especially in eliminating death from pancreatic cancer, lung cancer and childhood cancers. More than 600,000 Americans die from cancer each.
There is an old saying that the first wealth is good health. Faced with a dreadful disease or shortened life span, the value of one’s material assets or consumption rapidly becomes second order in magnitude. Most parents would give up nearly every material resource they have to prevent the death of a child.
The benefits to reducing pain and suffering and preventing the heart ache of losing a loved one to cancer are almost incalculable.
In a new study for Unleash Prosperity, Tomas Philipson and other economists at the University of Chicago, calculated the enormous monetary value in the U.S. from curing or drastically reducing mortality from cancer.
With new developments in cancer treatments such as gene therapies and prevention such as multi cancer blood tests, improved diets and physical activity, reducing obesity, allowing for more coordinated development of new drugs and vaccines, and particularly deregulating the approval process, the goal of a near cancer-free nation can potentially be achieved in the foreseeable future.
The study calculated the impact of eliminating cancer mortality entirely or by 80% in coming decades. This would eliminate some 30 million cancer deaths. That’s more American lives saved than American soldiers who died in World Wars one and two and every previous war over our 250 years as a nation.
The economic benefits would be felt through the monetized improvements in longevity, increased labor productivity, and additional fiscal revenue.
The economic value of killing cancer in 10 years generates $186 trillion in total economic benefits over the 35-year period.
Lowering the death rate by 80% in 20 years adds a value to the U.S. economy of $130 trillion. If cancer elimination is viewed as an investment with R&D costs up to $800 billion this amounts to an enormous internal rate of return with a minimum of more than 500 percent. There are very few investments that attain that rate of return.
The private sector is likely to lead this crusade with private investment dollars, but our government needs to greatly deregulate the process that often takes a decade for a treatment or diagnostic to reach the market.
The medical, drug and biotech industries that have the capacity and brainpower to achieve these goals will likely only capture a fraction of the societal benefits in terms of revenues and earnings. Previous research has found that medical innovators only capture around 5-10 percent of the value of the increased health they generate to patients and society. The other 90 percent benefits the survivors, their families, and the overall health of the U.S. economy.
The gift to humanity by ending the scourge of cancer would be one of the most valuable and equitable policy agenda imaginable by benefiting everyone across the nation and around the world – not just with better health, but with much higher living standards.
Stephen Moore is a co-founder of Unleash Prosperity and a senior fellow at America First Policy Institute.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
(Featured Image Media Credit: Screen Capture/PBS NewsHour)
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