A Fool and His Money
The American Cancer Society plans to spend $3 million over the next few months to encourage health reform, according to CongressDaily (unfortunately gated). What do you suppose they're doing with all the rest of the money they have at their disposal? Certainly not finding a cure for cancer. Gina Kolata, in a fascinating New York Times piece on our failure to cure cancer, has this to say:
Since the war on cancer began, the National Cancer Institute, the federal government's main cancer research entity, with 4,000 employees, has alone spent $105 billion. And other government agencies, universities, drug companies and philanthropies have chipped in uncounted billions more.
Yet the death rate for cancer, adjusted for the size and age of the population, dropped only 5 percent from 1950 to 2005. In contrast, the death rate for heart disease dropped 64 percent in that time, and for flu and pneumonia, it fell 58 percent.
I'll have more to say about this in the future.
The American Cancer Society would never suggest that people losing their employer-based health insurance because they are too sick to work their 30 hours per week is dangerous, depressing and deadly.
To bad we can’t get the truth from the American Cancer Society.
Does the American Cancer Society send COBRA notices to their own employees?
If the AHIP and the NFIB get their way the days of low cost individual health insurance in America will be gone forever. PLUS, we will be mandated to purchase. What a scam.
Great piece by Gina Kolata. A real eye opener.
Out of curiosity, what does the American Cancer Society do with all its money?
David, do you mean money like the $99 million given to the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Associationk, and the American Lung Association by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to fund activist efforts to bring about social change?
Linda, are you saying that these groups have found a higher calling? Higher, that is, than finding cures for fatal diseases? If so, they need to let their other donors in on the plan.
Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is right at the heart of America’s problems.
Don’t forget the AARP. A google search of Medicare MSA comes up with CMS 1st, then AARP 2nd with this MSA propaganda…
Yes, number 5 before the insurance company with the MSA Medicare contract or the bank that holds all the federal deposits. I kid you not. Consumers Union comes in a distant 8th with their confusion and lies…
We need 1 million Medicare seniors going tax free this open enrollment season starting 11/15/2009. There is no premium for the seniors and their “FREE” MSA at the bank is federally funded. That shouldn’t be a hard sell.
Don’t listen to the lies of the Non Profits. They have an agenda.
This is hilarious. It is Arlen Specter in the Washington Times.
Mr. Specter continued: “If we had pursued what President Nixon declared in 1970 as the war on cancer, we would have cured many strains. I think Jack Kemp would be alive today. And that research has saved or prolonged many lives, including mine.”
[…] have spent an enormous amount of money on cancer research with very little to show for all the effort. Here is what Gina Kolata wrote in The New York […]