Talking Cancer with the Candidates
The Lance Armstrong Foundation will host forums for presidential candidates today and tomorrow in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The forums, Democrats today, Republicans tomorrow, will focus, not surprisingly, on health care and the fight against cancer.
As a cancer survivor, this is an issue of great concern to me. Unfortunately, we can expect both the questions and answers to focus around more federal spending for research and the Democrats support for a government‐run national health care system. I wish Chris Matthews, who will moderate this forum, would point out to them that cancer survival rates in the U.S. have been rising, and that one reason for this is the free‐market health care system that these candidates love to criticize.
The one common characteristic of all national health care systems is that they ration care. Sometimes they ration it explicitly, denying certain types of treatment altogether. More often, they ration more indirectly, imposing global budgets or other cost constraints that limit the availability of high‐tech medical equipment or imposes long waits on patients seeking treatment. In the U.S. there are no such limits, meaning that the most advanced treatment options are far more available. This translates directly into saved lives.
Take prostate cancer, which I suffered from, for example. In most countries with national health insurance, the preferred treatment for prostate cancer is…to do nothing. Prostate cancer is a slow moving disease. Most patients are older and will live for several years after diagnosis. Therefore it is not cost‐effective in a world of socialized medicine to treat the disease too aggressively. The approach saves money, but comes at a more human cost.
Even though American men are more likely to be diagnosed with prostate cancer than their counterparts in other countries, we are less likely to die from the disease. Less than one out of five American men with prostate cancer will die from it, but 57 percent of British men and nearly half of French and German men will. Even in Canada, a quarter of men diagnosed with prostate cancer, die from the disease.
Similar results can be found for other forms of cancer. For instance, just 30 percent of U.S. citizens diagnosed with colon cancer die from it, compared to fully 74 percent in Britain, 62 percent in New Zealand, 58 percent in France, 57 percent in Germany, 53 percent in Australia, and 36 percent in Canada. Similarly, less than 25 percent of U.S. women die from breast cancer, but 46 percent of British women, 35 percent of French women, 31 percent of German women, 28 percent of Canadian women, 28 percent of Australian women, and 46 percent of women from New Zealand die from it.
Even when there is a desire to provide treatment, national health care systems often lack the resources to provide it. In Britain, for example, roughly 40 percent of cancer patients never get to see an oncology specialist. Delays in receiving treatment under Britain’s national health service are often so long that nearly 20 percent of colon cancer cases considered treatable when first diagnosed are incurable by the time treatment is finally offered.
But the advantages of free‐market health care go far beyond an absence of rationing. With no price controls, free‐market U.S. medicine provides the incentives that lead to innovation breakthroughs in new drugs and other medical technologies. U.S. companies have developed half of all the major new medicines introduced worldwide over the past 20 years. In fact, Americans played a key role in 80 percent of the most important medical advances of the past 30 years. Eighteen of the last 25 winners of the Nobel Prize in Medicine either are U.S. citizens or work here.
Obviously there are problems with the U.S health care system. I am sure we will hear plenty about that during these forums. But it is important to understand that for all its faults and all the criticism that it has received, the United States’ free market health care system has made it the place you want to be if you have a serious illness. Millions of cancer patients have discovered that. It would be nice if Lance Armstrong, Chris Matthews, and the candidates would stop to think about this.
