Government Waste: President Obama is pledging to spend $1 billion in taxpayers' money to find a cure for cancer. Why? Are there no incentives for the private sector to find a cure?
In charge of the White House Cancer Moonshot Task Force will be Vice President Joe Biden, whose son Beau tragically died of brain cancer last spring. Obama says Biden's job is to "end cancer as we know it."
That's truly a noble goal. Nearly 1.7 million new cases of cancer will be diagnosed this year in the U.S., and almost 600,000 Americans will die from the disease. There were more than 8 million cancer-related deaths worldwide in 2012 with about 14 million new cases. Cancer, one of the world's leading killers, is an insidious disease and needs to be stopped.
But throwing taxpayers' money at it to try to boost a presidential legacy is a waste. Government will not find a cure for cancer. The cure will come from the quarter that has the greatest incentive to find one: the pharmaceutical companies and medical device makers of the private sector.
Awaiting the companies that cure the many types of cancer -- each cancer generally needs its own specialized treatment -- is a world of riches. Imagine the demand for therapies that cure cancer and the revenue that would follow. Research noted in Scientific American has found that each "blockbuster drug typically generates $2 billion a year in profits for 10 years before its patent expires." The profit motive, especially with that many dollars, and more, to be earned, is an extraordinarily strong catalyst.
While it is pleasant to think that human compassion and intelligence will ultimately combine to find a cure, we cannot rely on man's nature. As Adam Smith said, "it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest." Replace "dinner" with "cure for cancer" and the formula still works.
Meanwhile, the public sector has no such incentive. There is no profit coming in return for a government cure, and finding one would actually result in a cutoff of research funding. The government incentive is to continue the research for as long as possible to keep the research dollars flowing. There is no reason for the White House Cancer Moonshot Task Force to attempt "to make a decade worth of advances in five years," as Biden is asking it to. All that would do is move the task force closer to shutting its doors.
That said, the task force could help. Because it has been given a recommendatory role as a part of its duties, it should be able to lean on the Food and Drug Administration to move faster on drug approvals, which can be so slow now that the FDA is hazardous to Americans' health. Health care scholar Merrill Matthews has pointed out on these pages that the way the system is currently set up, "FDA officials get very little notice when they approve a drug that works well; but they get tremendous criticism when they approve a drug and problems emerge." That must change.
The task force also needs to compel Congress to eliminate other regulations -- particularly those that choke capital flow to the companies which will develop cures -- that impede advancement.
The solution is in the private sector, though. Obama can continue repeating that silly narrative that government is just another word for the things we choose to do together, but that won't produce cures. It will only generate false hope. Better for Washington to leave that $1 billion pledged to the task force in the private sector, where it can actually do some good.
